My quick rating – 4.5/10. Frankie (Ariella Mastroianni) is a young mother with dyschronometria, a condition that makes her perception of time about as reliable as a clock from a bargain bin. To keep herself grounded, she relies on cassette tapes as a kind of analog GPS for her daily life. But bills don’t pay themselves, so when a mysterious woman (Renee Gagner) offers Frankie a “can’t-miss” job opportunity, she jumps at it because clearly nothing bad ever happens when strangers in noir thrillers such as Gazer hand you envelopes full of money.
The premise sets up nicely for a lean, absorbing noir mystery: a desperate woman, a shady job, and double crosses. Unfortunately, that’s not the film we get. Instead, writer/director Ryan J. Sloan stuffs the narrative full of extra ingredients—like a chef who can’t stop adding “just one more spice”—and ends up with a stew that’s more confusing than flavorful. Surreal dream sequences drift in and out, featuring some genuinely unsettling, Cronenberg-lite imagery that hints Sloan has seen Videodrome more than once. While they might work in a pure horror or psychological thriller, here they mostly gum up the pacing and leave you wondering whether you’ve missed a plot point or just accidentally nodded off.
Stylistically, Gazer tries to channel an early ’80s vibe, wide street shots that creep toward the subject, synth-heavy cues that scream “something tense is about to happen,” and a general sense of urban decay. The aesthetic mostly works, at least until the overstuffed plot drags you back into frustration. The cast is passable but never exceptional, delivering performances that get the job done but won’t be making my year-end “best of” list.
The trouble really sets in around the halfway mark. The film starts strong enough, but the tangle of unrelated subplots and underdeveloped ideas soon becomes a ball and chain on the story’s ankle. Scenes that should build tension instead meander, as if the movie itself is suffering from dyschronometria and has lost track of how much runtime is left. By the time the climax rolls around, you realize the “climax” is more of a shrug, capped off with a non-ending so unsatisfying it could serve as the dictionary example of “anticlimax.”
Sloan, to his credit, shows flashes of promise behind the camera. His eye for certain compositions and his willingness to lean into weirdness suggest there’s a better film in his future—one that hopefully trims the fat and trusts the core story to stand on its own. At 114 minutes, though, Gazer feels like a long walk to nowhere, complete with detours, dead ends, and a few eerie dream alleys that, while intriguing, don’t actually lead to the main road.
Amazon, along with this list of streamers, is carrying this one for you.
Log in to manage Simkl watchlist