“Brightwood” available on DVD August 22nd!
Jen and Dan have been a couple for a long time. A stupid long time. Such a long time, Jen has come to loathe Dan for everything he is worth. On the other hand, Dan self-deprecates himself into submission despite his love for Jen, even a loveless, spit firing Jen. When the two go for a run, hashing out the contentious night before, Jen heads for the pond to run laps around Dan in avoidance. Having circled around a few times, Jen realizes the once exit trail from the pond, the trail she run through to the pond, is now no longer visible. Perplexed, she voices her concern to Dan who also can’t seem to find the exit trail and every attempt to navigate through the surrounding forest reverts in them being brought back to the pond. With no way to escape a dead cell service zone, the couple realize their not alone when they come across different versions of themselves stuck on a time loop from the very beginning moment the quarreling couple first ran onto the pond circuit to the future, disheveled versions that no longer have humanity.
Strained relationships and cosmic horror go hand-in-hand. Or, at least, sometimes they feel like they do with an endless and revolving stagnation of being one with another as the hatred for the other and the fear of being alone cancel out any promise of an amiable or favorable solution. Instead, staying put seems safe albeit the loop around effect of revising old and reoccurring snags that keep the relationship stale and hopeless instead of moving forward. That’s possibly how writer-director Dane Elcar sees the suffocating time warping scenario playout symbolized in his debut cosmic horror feature “Brightwood.” Based off and remade from Elcar’s 2018 20-minute short film entitled “The Pond,” anxiety riddles an already one-sided contempt couple who can’t find the path out of not only the pond but also their relationship in the thriller that’s peppered with dark comedy. The 2022 feature, filmed around Egbert Lake in New Jersey, is produced by the director as well as star Max Woertendyke under Noble Gas Media productions presented by Media Moove and the LLC, Pond Pictures.
“Brightwood” has a whopping cast of two and, honestly, the story doesn’t require the need for more and the principals, who may be better described as neutral characters or possibly as far as anti-protagonists, run the gamut of moral principles depending on which in-time version of them we’re witnessing. Dana Berger and Max Woertendyke play the beleaguered and one-sided cantankerous couple Jen and Dan who are unable to escape the mysterious circumstances of being trapped around and forced to endured permanent residence at the trail that encircles a nearby pond. The couple’s relationship dilemma relates irreconciled differences once adoring lovers cross beyond into when the romance goes stale. Jen notes this by saying how she hates Dan’s smell as if it just lingers in her nasal cavity. Hate is sowed deep after years of living with the person she has come to despise because of Dan’s lack of gumption to be anything but mediocre. Like a puppy trying to keep up with an odiously pissed off owner, Dan mostly fears losing the one woman who likely puts up with his inadequacies. Berger and Woertendyke really do nail the exposition history while feeding into these dynamics to setup their characters’ climatic, life-altering stuck in an invisible cosmic cage. Stuck, the word that best describes both a worn-out relationship and the unnatural situation they’re in. Jen and Dan are stuck together, possibly forever, to work out couple complications or to give up and just terminate it all. The actors tap into that cathartic back-and-forth by giving a range of therapeutic emotion performances that purges truth and guilt from their characters, like any relationship would in order to grow and/or move forward.
“Brightwood” is one diabolical tale of torment of being indefinitely stuck in relationship Hell. Analogies and metaphors compile along the way in a parallel stream of unfavorable situations. To add more layers, Dane Elcar throws them for a loop, literally. Jen and Dan are copied over-and-over again in a replay of moments and time and each time they’re copied, new developments emerge in the time loop that were different from before, ascertained by previous versions of themselves. Conceptionally, the idea has it’s convoluted moments in trying to make the characters appear derived from a particular staring point and interact with each other in various behavioral outcomes, but this particular subtenant, niche layer of the cosmic horror genre is innately difficult to represent but a moderate degree of success can be conveyed or extracted depending on how much you’re willing to be opened minded, or stretched the limits of reasonability, or just don’t plain give a damn about it making sense. Films like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s saturated cosmic horror “The Endless” or not-so-cosmic but tantamount to the concept is George Moïse’s “Counter Clockwise” are examples that work and work well to entertain a coherency and a consistency of repeated time. If expecting a flashy and full-fledged effects driven feature, “Brightwood” is the opposite with a low-key approach that relies on staggering scenes to eventually overlap them, keeping the common core element of the pond as a center focus and turning it instantly in our minds as an undercurrent source of evil despite’s its serenity and idyllic nature. Little do we know, our instincts might be more on point than lead to believe.
Psychotic endlessness is synonymous with loveless relationships in Dan Elcar’s “Brightwood” available on the 3rd DVD distributed by Cinephobia Releasing come August 22nd. The single layer, interlaced DVD is presented in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Image quality on the release displays a subtle overexposure, shot mostly with natural daylight, and desaturated video image not terribly rich with coloring. Basic detail renders over nicely, exhibiting fair delineating and depth within a nature coloring scheme that micro blends characters into the foliage and mirror pond landscape. Minor aliasing shows within the frame but the overall compression artefacts end there, decoding data at the higher end of where DVD’s can perform around 7-8 Mbps. “Brightwood” comes equipped with two English audio options – Dolby Digital Stereo 2.0 and a Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound. Between the tracks, dialogue transcends the others in a very line heavy narrative to push the small cast along but there’s a suffice amount of leaf rustling and trail running ambience and range to expand the sound into the back channels. Jason Cooks composed score a lightly melodious score mixed with harsh tones to keep viewers edgy with suspense. English subtitles are available. Bonus features include a feature commentary from director Dane Elcar and stars Max Woertendyke and Dana Berger, 11-minutes of deleted scenes, the original 17-minute short “The Pond,” and Cinephobia Releasing trailers. The standard DVD sports “Brightwood” poster art with no insert on the inside and the disc art the same as the poster with release spec, which are a not rated feature and a runtime of 84 minutes with an unlisted regionality of region 1 playback. “Brightwood” endures the subgenre’s stumbling blocks with concentrated acting stability and synergy between the 100% invested Dana Berger and Max Woertendyke who could literally perpetuate Dane Elcar’s vision endlessly.
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