Straight out of the box – other viewing options are available – Gazer is a remarkable movie. How remarkable becomes clear once you know a bit of its backstory.
But for starters let’s say what it’s about and who’s in it etc. It’s a neo-noir, more old-school noir than most, and stars Ariella Mastroianni as a young woman with a neurological condition called dyschronometria, which is an inability to measure time or relate to it. Frankie (Mastroianni) is adrift in the world without reference points. She struggles to keep her show on the road. As we meet her she’s being fired from (another) McJob, for being distracted by something going on in an upstairs window over the road. She looked away for a second from the task at hand, momentarily tuning out from the cassette tapes she constantly listens to for focus, and was suddenly lost. And now she’s also jobless.
What was happening in that upstairs window is what the rest of the film is about, but all that need be said about it is that it’s reminiscent of events in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and introduces the film’s other character, who is called Paige, or Claire, this confusion over her name eventually revealing itself as the key plot turn.
Between being fired and things degenerating into a paranoid melee of mistaken identity and murder, Frankie becomes the existential gumshoe, walking the mean streets trying to piece things together. She’s a distant relation of the Guy Pearce character in Memento, perhaps. On a more mundane level she’s also trying to maintain access to her daughter, now being looked after by her dead husband’s hard-faced mother (Marianne Goodell). Frankie’s dychronometria is terminal, so her mother-in-law may have a point.
First-time director Ryan Sloan put this film together with Mastroianni while he held down a regular job as an electrician and she did shifts waitressing. Having decided, hey, let’s make a movie, they got together all the films they liked, then watched them while taking copious notes on how they were structured. Once they worked out what they wanted to do, they shot their film on the hoof over two and a half years, filming at weekends, when their actors were available. The film’s episodic, disjointed structure and handful of characters really helped them here.
The “easy” bit complete, the unexpected happened when Sloan and Mastroianni started hawking their film about. It started getting a lot of interest on the film festival circuit. Suddenly, from nowhere, they were off to the races. Even so, as Mastroianni related in an interview, after a screening of Gazer at Cannes, where they’d been feted, they went back to their old jobs. Mastroianni recalls fielding calls from producers, distributors and other interested parties “while giving people their lasagna.”
Mastroianni? She is related to Marcello, apparently, but so distantly that there’s no hint of a nepo connection, though there is something familiar in that chunky facial bone structure, which the camera likes. Handy if you’re in almost every second of the movie and a useful add-on if you’re already a magnetic and nicely minimalist screen presence.
As for what we’re being served, the film jangles along in a non-linear fashion, shot often at night, with a noir voiceover by amateur sleuth Frankie, nicely dark visuals by Matheus Bastos (this is definitely one for the showreel) and a soundtrack by Steve Matthew Carter that amusingly harks back to the noirs of yore – saxophones moan and minor keys are plundered for pathos. Raymond Chandler is in here somewhere.
There’s the punk spareness of early Alex Cox, obvious references to David Cronenberg and David Lynch and an old school MO reflected in its non-specific setting. Is it the 1970s? If not, why all the cassette-era tech?
By the end I had been royally entertained, and forgave the structural repetitions and the pacing issues because the acting was so good, by Mastroianni and support players who must have found the disjointed and extended shooting schedule punishing. It’s a good film. Here’s hoping Mastroianni and Sloan are working on another one and can give up the day jobs. Hold the lasagna!
Gazer – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
