I AM THE WANDERER, Directed by Philip Brocklehurst, is a surreal and meditative film about a young man wandering between hope and despair.
Brocklehurst states that his film is along the style of David Lynch – a visual artist whose style can best be described as surreal, and not for the faint of heart. Lynch’s films are typically sparse in action, heavy in drama and dwell in the bizarre.
The film opens up with The Wanderer (Jonathan Skye-O’Brien) asleep under a tree. He awakens to seem lost and confused. The Beautiful Angel (Zuzana Spacirova) comes in and out of the film. It seems she represents “hope” on this character’s journey. The audience never gets a sense of who she is, if she is even real or why The Wanderer wound up here in the first place. We never come to realize what drives him between hope and despair. Unfortunately, the film is too general to make you care or root for the character.
At 41 minutes this film is way too long. The film is repetitive – which doesn’t drive the action forward. A scene plays out for more time than needed and seems duplicated throughout. For instance, the hitchhiking scenes are the same – over and over again.
The story, along with performance, is not layered – it’s flat. It’s almost one color throughout. With almost no dialogue, heavy dramatic score and repetitive long scenes, the film is hard to get through.
The filmmaker mentioned that there were problems while making the film which caused the film to be unfinished. A lot of scenes he had planned couldn’t be filmed so he tried to make it work with what he had.
Perhaps if the planned scenes were shot, the editing was tighter in driving the story forward… it could be a different journey for the audience.