Imagine spending months and months making a movie only to see it slide past its potential audience – damned to be discovered on DVD, Blu-ray, Netflix or one of a dozen other ancillary markets, when you know it was made for the big screen.
Most directors say it doesn’t bother them, but of course they have to say that. Over the years, I’ve heard a dozen variations on “the movie’s getting seen, that’s all that matters” when talking to someone whose movie is bypassing theatrical release, but it’s almost always a false front you don’t pour yourself into a movie in the hopes that people will catch up to it eventually. You want them to see it the way you saw it in your head – big screen, big sound, big impact.
Katie Aselton’s Black Rock – starring herself, Lake Bell and Kate Bosworth as estranged friends who find themselves trapped on an island with a pair of unbalanced ex-military goons – was very clearly made to be watched in a theatre, with an audience. It’s a thriller, and the bigger the screen, the more enveloping the experience.
It’s been making the rounds at various American film festivals, but like most modestly budgeted projects lacking an A-list star, it seemed to be headed straight to VOD and DVD in Canada.
But sometimes things work out, and Black Rock has landed on a screen at the Carlton Cinemas. It’s only playing two shows a day, but if you’re looking for an intelligent, tightly scripted suspense picture, this is something you should make the time to see. Aselton’s made a reverse-angle version of I Spit On Your Grave, reinterpreting the basic requirements of the ’70s exploitation picture – nudity, violence, veiled political commentary – through a female perspective, and it makes a really interesting double-feature with In A World …, co-star Bell’s own debut as a writer-director.
It’s a shame Black Rock had a theatrical run in the U.S. earlier this summer like Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies, which opens next week, it feels like it would have been perfect for TIFF’s Contemporary World Cinema program.
Such are the whims of distribution, I guess. But you should go and see Black Rock while you can, rather than wait for the home version. She might not admit it on the record, but I’d be willing to bet Aselton would want it that way.
