Flasz On Film

Nobody ever teaches you how to write a negative review. There is no course titled “Humane Putdowns 101” at the Community College of Film Twitter, so you are forced to rely entirely on your gut and your moral backbone when attempting to discuss a movie you can’t bring yourself to recommend. Arguably, at least from where I’m sitting this is where the problem truly takes shape because there is a difference between writing off a massive blockbuster – especially as a little mouse with a blog nobody cares about – and pouring vitriol at someone’s independent feature debut.  

This is where I am with Inland, a directorial debut from writer-director Fridtjof Ryder starring Rory Alexander, Mark Rylance, Shaun Dingwall and a few others. Put succinctly, it is an attempt at an oneiric fairy tale where we follow a young man’s spiralling journey into accepting his roots, making peace with the disappearance of his mother and finding a long-supressed connection with the natural world he has carried in his bloodline without necessarily understanding its provenance. At least that’s my charitable reading of what Inland is about if I were to take stock of its narrative on the most superficial level.  

However, I don’t believe for a second that Ryder ever intended this movie to function as a canonical story with a beginning, a middle and a conclusion. Instead, I surmise Inland is more of a tone poem, which we are supposed to treat like a pine-scented Yankee candle. You don’t interact with a candle. It won’t entertain you. It probably won’t instill cathartic realizations in you either. What it might do – if you are into meditation and you don’t mind your room smelling like a campfire – is provide a platform for you to wrestle with your own thoughts, grudges and regrets.  

But! 

If you’re not fond of sitting by the candlelight and thinking about your life, you are probably not going to get much out of the experience because the candle in question is not laced with psychedelics and the process itself isn’t that unique either. Inland is just a Yankee candle. You light it, it smells nice, and the rest is up to you. So, what I am trying to say is that Ryder’s debut film is probably quite an unfortunate beast because it is impossible to recommend to anyone who isn’t primed for this kind of an experience and even as far as these kinds of experiences go, it’s not particularly inventive or adventurous.  

However, it doesn’t mean the movie is terrible or that it shouldn’t exist. On the contrary, I am glad that it does just as I am glad scented candles exist because there is a time and a place to light one. Problem is, as pine-scented Yankee candles go, Inland is quite pungent, so it effectively distracts you from working on your own detachment from reality, unless you belong to the tiny demographic of pine fans who relish this scent and cannot imagine their lives without it; there’s always one in your neighbourhood, I am told.  

So, what I can only say is that I wish there was something more to this experience because I do not belong to the small subsection of the public at large who go absolutely bananas when they detect even a trace of pine scent in the air. I find Inland quite languid and almost too contemplative for its own good. Again, if I were to apply the least charitable reading of how the narrative and the tone work together, I would likely describe it as a cryptic style-over-substance mess that actively hides its shallow underpinnings under suggestive imagery of the natural world, close-ups of people in poorly lit interiors and protracted scenes of naked men walking into forests. But I believe all these images come from a pure place and that the filmmakers are truly attempting to give me – the viewer – space to explore something on my own. What they don’t give me are suggestive enough prompts to facilitate the experience, though, which unfortunately works against what I believe is the intended goal of the film – the idea of offering us an introspective window into connections we may have lost through generations-long pursuit of material wealth and connection to things that do not matter one iota to our well-being. Inland wants to function as a vehicle for the viewer to achieve some kind of emotional transcendence, where we are invited to undress and walk buck-naked into a forest together with Rory Alexander’s character at the end of the movie, and together with him give up our earthly possessions and re-establish links to an ancient world whose murmurs we have suppressed with the tumult of our modern lives. This is, by the way, weirdly reminiscent of the final scene is The Witch, though markedly less sinister.  

Unfortunately, the disconnect between what I believe Inland wants me to do and what it can get me to do is the main issue here. The big gamble this movie makes is that it invites me on a journey of self-discovery by putting me in a dimly lit room where a pine-scented Yankee candle is lit in the corner and ambient sounds of a forest are piped in through a JBL speaker tucked right behind that candle. It’s just not fully conducive to having a metaphysical experience, I must admit. Whichever way I attempt to look at this movie, Inland comes up short. Its reach simply exceeds its grasp.  

However, I am glad this movie exists because you have to start somewhere. Not everyone gets to make Eraserhead on their first go. Sometimes, what you end up making is Lost River, which – for those who managed to successfully erase it from their memories already – is a film Ryan Gosling directed having been inspired to do so by Nicolas Winding Refn and the experience of working closely with him on Only God Forgives.  

Strangely enough, Inland is a similar affair. It’s a film that’s inherently flawed but in its own way it is perfectly beautiful… even if it takes eternity and a half to sit through it. Therefore, I would like to leave you with the following thoughts. Inland is not a movie I can safely recommend. It’s a festival anti-personnel mine you step on thinking nothing could go wrong and you wake up in a hospital with your legs missing. But I would like to at least do what I can to make sure it does not share the fate of Lost River, whose failure to connect with both audiences and critics successfully cured Gosling from any directorial aspirations. I want to see Fridtjof Ryder continue making films. I think he genuinely has a way of shaping imagery to facilitate dreamlike experiences. What I wish is for those experiences to be filled with dreams I would want to be a part of. And he will truly win once he engineers an experience I wouldn’t want to leave. Inland, however, is not it. It’s a pine-scented Yankee candle. It might be arousing and transcendental to some, but it’s just not my micro-fetish.