One of the cardinal sins in making a captivating thriller is overstuffing the picture with too many story elements, making what should be something intriguing into something muddled, difficult to follow and unfulfilling. That can be made all the worse by incorporating extraneous filler that amounts to little more than padding while unsuccessfully trying to pass itself off as something allegedly poignant and meaningful to the overall story. And, if the filmmaker throws in some poor, at times unintelligible sound quality for good measure, you’ve got a recipe for a production that misses the mark by a decidedly wide margin. That, unfortunately, is the case with writer-director Ryan J. Sloan’s debut feature, an overlong slog that starts out well but overstays its welcome for all of the foregoing reasons. Frankie Rhodes (Ariela Mastroianni), a widowed single mother struggling with financial difficulties, custody issues involving her young daughter and a terminal illness that’s causing declining cognitive impairment, struggles to cope with these challenges but often to no avail. However, when she meets a mysterious woman (Renee Gagner) who promises her a financial windfall to help her out of a bind, Frankie jumps at the chance, only to find herself unwittingly caught up in a web of deceit and criminality in which she becomes the suspected culprit. If the story were left at that, it might well have made for an absorbing noir mystery. Instead, however, the plot is infused with an array of seemingly unnecessary (and often underdeveloped and/or inadequately explained) story threads that only bog down the picture’s flow. This includes several supernatural, surreal and arguably bizarre sequences that appear to occur in the dream state (even if not fully recognized as such by the protagonist or sufficiently explained for viewers). The result is a run-on story that runs out of gas about midway through, becoming a progressively tedious watch that fails to maintain audience attention. To its credit, the film’s stylistic qualities are somewhat engaging and show some promise – at least at the outset – but they’re far from enough to sustain viewer interest as the saga haphazardly plays out toward what I ultimately found to be an unsatisfying conclusion. From this project, it would seem the filmmaker has potential to create works that are visually involving but that definitely need more solid narrative foundations to make them work as fully fleshed-out finished products, something that’s sorely lacking here. Perhaps “Gazer” represents a shakedown vehicle for the director to work out the bugs and prepare for better developed future projects (and, if so, then this may not be an entirely wasted effort). However, the next time out, the filmmaker needs to show improvement if there’s to be a next time after that.
