Dis­cov­er the Lynchi­an mys­ter­ies of this back­woods meta-horror

Res­o­lu­tion comes with the strong sense of an end­ing. This is true right from its title, which points towards the notion of nar­ra­tive com­pli­ca­tions resolved with a sat­is­fac­to­ry dénoue­ment – even as it simul­ta­ne­ous­ly alludes, through a play on words, to the rel­a­tive clar­i­ty of medi­at­ed images.

The film opens with medi­at­ed images. A low-qual­i­ty mon­tage of Chris Daniels (Vin­ny Cur­ran) out in the ​‘boonies’, smok­ing crys­tal meth, rant­i­ng, shoot­ing at bot­tles, injur­ing him­self and falling out of a tree, resolves itself into a video that Chris’ best friend Michael Danube (Peter Cilel­la) is watch­ing on his laptop.

With shades of David Lynch’s Lost High­way or Michael Haneke’s Hid­den, the video turns up (along with a map) as a link in Michael’s email, with no clue as to who sent or indeed shot it. But Michael decides to head out to the rur­al area where Chris is stay­ing to per­form a des­per­ate inter­ven­tion. So he tases his friend, cuffs him to a pipe in his back­woods squat, and set­tles in to help him get clean. There is already an exit strat­e­gy in place, for both of them: in sev­en days’ time, Michael plans to return to his preg­nant wife Jen­nifer (Emi­ly Mon­tagie) in their urban home, with or with­out Chris, while Chris him­self is hap­py just to die tweaking.

‘Cold turkey in a cab­in’ was also the basic plot of Fede Alvarez’s much big­ger bud­get­ed and bet­ter known stu­dio hor­ror Evil Dead – but where the lat­ter was an entire­ly deriv­a­tive (if very well-craft­ed) remake, this arrest­ing debut from Justin Ben­son and Aaron Moor­head – whose sub­se­quent fea­tures Spring and The End­less share char­ac­ters, themes and a uni­verse with Res­o­lu­tion – is a true orig­i­nal, not so much reboot­ing oth­er films as end­less­ly reimag­in­ing itself and invent­ing its own weird world.

For as Chris testi­ly endures with­draw­al, and Michael explores his envi­rons, some­one or some­thing is watch­ing their sto­ry unfold, in search, along with these two char­ac­ters, of an end­ing. The result is a Piran­del­lo-esque sort of para­dox­i­cal meta-hor­ror whose folk are unwit­ting play­ers in a film (or sev­er­al), des­per­ate to find a way safe­ly to exit the stage and escape the gaze of an unseen, and obvi­ous­ly view­er-like, observer.

From the start, the occa­sion­al intru­sion of odd, arbi­trary-seem­ing cam­era angles and dis­em­bod­ied hand­held POV shots con­jures the pres­ence of the stalk­er type famil­iar from count­less slash­er films. But these shots are accom­pa­nied by strange lens flare effects and the sound of a whirring reel, sug­ges­tive of an ama­teur film­mak­er (work­ing with old kit). Sure enough, Michael fol­lows a trail of pho­tos and jour­nals and paint­ings and LPs and film reels, all scat­tered about like bread­crumbs and all telling sto­ries with vio­lent end­ings. Soon there is found footage (in a vari­ety of media) depict­ing Michael and Chris them­selves, and pre­sag­ing a sticky end for them.

“Some­one might be mess­ing with us,” says Michael, and there is any num­ber of sus­pects in the vicin­i­ty. For this back­road com­mu­ni­ty has in its orbit all man­ner of aggres­sive deal­ers, asy­lum strays, End Time cultists (the direc­tors in a cameo), dodgy estate agents, lost aca­d­e­mics and a dis­grun­tled trio of local Native Amer­i­cans. Yet as one res­o­lu­tion or anoth­er approach­es, Chris and Michael start won­der­ing if they might be under the mag­ni­fy­ing glass of some­thing far more inef­fa­ble and incom­pre­hen­si­ble, for whom they have become the lat­est in a long line of mere­ly medi­at­ed playthings.

Set in the wild hin­ter­lands of the US main­stream, and also occu­py­ing a rar­efied niche in indie cin­e­ma, Res­o­lu­tion offers a micro­cosm of under­rep­re­sent­ed, odd­ball Amer­i­cana, as it tells (and retells) the sto­ry – for an outsider’s amuse­ment and enter­tain­ment – of the nation’s mar­gin­alised, for­got­ten and over­looked. Thanks to a com­bi­na­tion of Curran’s and Cillela’s pal­pa­ble chem­istry and Benson’s wit­ty script, this bick­er­ing pair makes for good com­pa­ny, their believ­able friend­ship always anchor­ing the oth­er­wise uncan­ny events cir­cling in.

Accord­ing­ly the film uses a palat­able bud­dy pic frame to explore much big­ger ques­tions of mor­tal­i­ty, infin­i­ty and escha­tol­ogy, as it reveals us all to be just part of a nar­ra­tive that is stage man­aged by forces we can nev­er ful­ly under­stand, but that, for all its vari­ety, always comes to the same end.

Res­o­lu­tion is released on Blu-Ray Two-Disc Lim­it­ed Edi­tion, togeth­er with Ben­son and Moorhead’s new film, The End­less, by Arrow Films on 2 July.