After a fatal car accident, a family is plunged into an unimaginable nightmare where every choice may cost them everything.
Grimmfest says: Lucky Cerruti’s ferocious debut feature reboots and reinvigorates the popular genre trope of condescending city dwellers falling foul of the inhabitants of small-town America, amping it up to a whole new level of heartbreaking and horrifying. The film starts out deceptively, as as a kind of 90s style family drama, in which a troubled young man, his heavily pregnant girlfriend, bullish gay younger brother, and the brother’s latest boyfriend, find themselves travelling to the funeral of their long estranged and abusive father. Cerruti takes time to establish all four characters, their relationships, and to set them on their respective narrative and emotional journeys… And then just totally derails the entire set-up, as the family stop for food at an out of the way family owned “Diner”, and things very quickly get shockingly out of hand. The end result is all the more effective because it doesn’t allow for easy resolutions; things escalate in the moment, and no-one is really innocent. By the end, the narrative has moved from character drama, through hillbilly gothic, to something akin to the Gallic “New Extremist” films of the early 2000s; a smart, tense, devious, unremittingly brutal, utterly pitiless film, which still manages to deliver one brilliant final gut-punching twist, that only underlines the horror and absurdity of everything that happens.
Followed by a Q&A with the film makers.