A lonely woman sees something she can't unsee in ‘Gazer,' an industrious thriller

Los Angeles Times

12-04-2025

A small, hunched New Jersey woman named Frankie with intense eyes and a severe pixie cut is the central protagonist of the low-budget mystery 'Gazer,' from first-time feature director Ryan J. Sloan. You'd be forgiven for thinking, given her her drawn, caved-in appearance, hoodie-shrouded and forever preoccupied with self-recorded cassette tapes, that she'd typically be a bit-player oddity in somebody else's paranoid thriller.
But this lonely voyeur with a debilitating neurological disorder — played with haunted energy by star and co-writer Ariella Mastroianni — is a big reason this odd duck of a nerve-jangler compels the way it does. When its cinematic influences aren't so obvious and its story particulars aren't distractingly fuzzy, this earnestly moody film serves notice that indie urban noir can still be a potent calling card for up-and-coming talents.
The movie's DIY-to-OMG backstory alone is invigorating: A movie-mad New Jersey electrician, director Sloan and his cinephile collaborator Mastroianni crammed in filming on weekends over two years, then shockingly landed 'Gazer' in the Directors' Fortnight at last year's Cannes Film Festival, an unheard-of triumph for so unpedigreed an entry. Perhaps the French gatekeepers had in mind their own storied history of obsessives-turned-filmmakers like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard and took a shine to the deeply ingrained movie-ness of it all.
For one thing, from the tight opening shot on Mastroianni's eyes, 'Gazer' offers that reliable construct of a witnessed crime. Frankie, her voice in her ears telling her to notice everything around her as a way of not zoning out, is supposed to be concentrating on her job pumping gas. But she's focused instead on the apartment block across the street and what she believes to be an act of violence silhouetted in a window. A disheveled woman then emerges from the side of the building, meets Frankie's stare and moves off into the night.
Later, at a grief support-group meeting, that same woman, Paige (Renee Gagner), introduces herself, expresses fear of an abusive brother and asks if Frankie can help her, for which she'll pay. Frankie needs the money: She's a young widow eking out a meager existence without custody of her young daughter and with an erratic condition that causes her to lose blocks of time. Sleep isn't much help thanks to enigmatic body-horror nightmares evoking the circumstances surrounding her husband's death. But more immediately, nothing about that mysterious stranger turns out to be what it seems, and suddenly Frankie's life is in danger.
In other words, hello, Hitchcock, De Palma, Nolan, Cronenberg, Lynch and Lodge Kerrigan ('Keane') for good measure. And yet none of that is really a minus, since Sloan, working in evocatively dingy concert with cinematographer Matheus Bastos across a concrete-jungle playground of warehouses, motels and side streets, still achieves his own aura of roiling unease with every blind corner.
Sloan's rough-and-tumble peekaboo game is exemplary for a first-timer. I wish the same could be said about his overlong dream-logic interludes, which tantalize as peeks into Frankie's psyche but eventually feel like style filler. That also goes for his vague treatment of Frankie's real-life condition, called dyschronometria. Losing time sounds like it should slot neatly into a ticking-clock suspense film, but it never achieves liftoff the way 'Memento' turned an amnesiac's daily struggle into catnip.
Better and truer than that character gimmick, though, is the well-realized, lived-in pall of Frankie's sad existence, which imbues her problem-solving survival with a genuinely fresh, in-the-bones urgency. As damaged heroes go, Mastroianni easily keeps our attention and triggers our sympathies for someone who resists the abyss, as near to it as she is. 'Gazer' suggests something of a bright future for the plucky, confident genre enthusiasts who've willed it into existence.