Gazer review – ineffably creepy and unbearably tense noir chiller

The Guardian

23-07-2025

Here is a paranoid noir chiller from the US, shot on 16mm on the mean streets of Jersey City; it is a fascinating debut for first-time feature director Ryan J Sloan that premiered at Cannes last year and is now getting its much-deserved UK release. A genuine skin-crawling unease seeps out of the screen for every second of its running time, helped by a brooding, moaning electronic score by Steve Matthew Carter. This ineffably creepy, often unbearably tense and disquieting film has a little of early Christopher Nolan (the Nolan of Following and Memento), with hints of Lynch and Cronenberg in its hallucinatory episodes.
Sloan's co-writer and partner Ariella Mastroianni (reportedly a very distant relative of Marcello) stars as Frankie, a woman living on the edge of poverty, suffering from the neurogenerative disorders ataxia and dyschronometria. This means that she is disoriented and cannot accurately judge the passing of time, a condition she attempts to manage by listening to 30-minute tapes on an old-fashioned Sony Walkman, and by gazing in at the windows of total strangers. Her pinched, sharp, intelligent and discontented face dominates the screen; she radiates suppressed anguish and rage at everything that has happened and will happen to her, and at the idea that her condition means she will have to resign herself to an assisted living facility. The scene in which a harassed doctor puts this to her is itself a masterly set piece of grimness.
Her husband apparently took his own life some time ago, an ambiguous event which recurs to her in vivid nightmares – was she somehow responsible? – which means Frankie is now legally obliged to let her young daughter be looked after by her glowering mother-in-law. At a therapy group for those who have lost loved ones to suicide, Frankie meets a mysteriously intense young woman (Renee Gagner) whom she remembers seeing in a window, and who puts to her a strange proposition; she says she is being abused and bullied by her aggressive cop brother (Jack Alberts) and needs to get away from their shared apartment, but he is keeping her car keys. If Frankie will break into the apartment and get them, and drive her car to the remote Jersey wetlands, she can have $3,000.
But can Frankie do this without zoning out, or suffering one of her 'flashforward' episodes where hours can suddenly go past in an instant? Gazer's atmosphere of looming disaster and dreamlike oppression crowds in on you as the movie progresses; an intriguing, genuinely scary picture.
Gazer is in UK cinemas from 25 July.