Deadland

Back to the SXSW festival for a tough thriller; writer and director Lance Larson’s film Deadland is a refined, intense piece of elevated horror that plays successfully with the hot button topic of borders. It’s perhaps understandable that a country like Mexico, which has its identity entrenched with the  border with the United States, should also find the spiritual border between life and the afterlife to be a metaphor in its spiritual beliefs. It’s an idea that was surprisingly deftly well-explored in Pixar’s animation Coco, but Deadland takes the concept in a far more serious and elliptical way; those who dug Donald Cammell or Nic Roeg’s storytelling style in the 70’s and 80’s should apply here…

U.S. Border Patrol Agent Angel Waters (Roberto Urbina) finds the body of a man who seems to have failed in an attempted border crossing; he puts the body in a body bag, and starts to drive it in his patrol car back to his station when the man abruptly seems to come back to life. The stranger is accidentally shot and killed at the police station in events beyond Waters’ control, and he makes the difficult decision to cover his tracks and bury the stranger in the desert…

Of course, Waters hasn’t heard the end of the saga of the displaced stranger, but there’s more. Waters’ father, who the cop has never previously met, mysteriously appears at his family home, and their estrangement has drawn another barrier between the two men. The afterlife seems to have been operating a ‘one in, one out’ policy, and that sense of displacement seems central to the themes of Deadlands.

Co-written with David Elliot and Jas Shelton, Deadland is a sombre, moody film; this isn’t for thrill-seekers, although the brooding, melancholy atmosphere is infectious. Deadland never quite shows its hand until the end, and that’s a good thing; there are multiple meanings here, and Larson’s film is all the better when mining ambiguity from a strange, complex situation. Deadland ends up playing with the kind of tricky metaphorical deck as Carlos Reygadas’ Battle in Heaven, and that’s high praise for a debut feature.