Desert Road gets its name from its only, lonely geographical aspect which is: a road which is just a dry stretch running from nowhere in California. There are a few points of interest, a gas station which is most probably the last one for 100 miles and a dreary looking fenced off factory where, one imagines, there is deep drudgery a plenty and all sorts of things being made, god knows what but otherwise, it is vacant dry lands with sand dunes everywhere one looks on either side of the road for the most part. For most, this is simply the desolate space through which one travels to get from one point to another. However, in the skillful hands of first time writer/director Shannon Triplett, the least terrifying parts of the film (the road in question) however becomes far more horrifying than it looks and I emphasize torture through its design as some Otherworldly dimension that challenges perception of space and time with no intention of ever letting one escape back again to the world in which the character sits and reflects on ones failures. Almost right off the bat, Desert Road is set up as an effective and tight thriller. But the most entertaining part is to observe how it transitions and transforms from one genre into the next, and what seem as ordinary, gives way to mystical discomforts.
It is a road, more specifically, California State Route 190 and a young woman named Clare (Kristine Forsyth) who is attempting to escape the Golden State by making her way to Iowa. Clare is a wannabe photographer who feels like she has that dream in her past since success has been elusive, and she is bitter enough to consider heading back and abandoning whatever aspirations she has. She makes a pit stop at the gas station, finding it uncomfortable when Randy (Max Matten), the strange and unnaturally competitive male cashier who is much younger, gives a series of weird looks. Clare makes an excuse and leaves the car claiming that her boyfriend is seated there. She is terrified and hurriedly drives away from the place. However, she does not drive for long because she has a flat tire which causes her vehicle to veer off the road uncontrollably. She is capable enough to change the flat but cannot do much with the little boulder that is jammed beneath her vehicle that has made it immobile on the roadside. The reception in her cellphone is quite poor and she tends to have protection within the viewers that do look at her, particularly when she is forced to return to the gas station and face the disturbing Randy once more.
Then, the nauseating twists which neither Clare nor the audience have predicted start to unfold. There’s a fair chance now that Randy is not who he says he is. And maybe it is the case with Steve (Ryan Hurst) too, the man who offers his help out of the kindness of his heart and claims that he is just a tow truck driver… but is more likely the local sheriff? To Clare, things are becoming more and more disorienting as the minutes pass and she no longer knows whether it is the con she is a victim of or the head injury she acquired in the car crash. (The back of her head is pretty much losing blood now.) Suspecting everyone except for herself, she sets off towards the closest interstate. There is one caveat: Regardless of the direction she chooses and whichever way she proceeds along the road, she eventually finds herself, once again, at her car. She looks for a direction perpendicular to CA 190, hoping to find an adjacent road, about which she knows, lies over the ridge a little further. She crosses it… and lands back on the 190 again. Clare’s world has shrunk down to what appears to be a diameter of under a mile with just the road, the factory and the gas station with the formats tattered around constantly.
She is stuck and a couple of her things have started disappearing from her car, presumably taken by an old drifter woman (Frances Fisher), who resides in a tent at the mountain’s edge. There is little doubt that basic geographical principles apply to this location, and, eventually, the principles of time itself are no longer of great concern.
What Triplett tells us here feels like a great short story, one of those interludes found in a thick collection of Stephen King’s works somewhere close to the middle. (This is a nice compliment, and I look forward to her being flattered). Although Desert Road has a small cast, most people are memorable in this film. With each situation that Clare foils, Forsyth (the former model who has surfaced in such curiosities as Gareth Edwards’ Apostle and the eco thriller, How to Blow Up a Pipeline in 2022) gets more screen exposure since she has to play a character who not only faces difficult and strange circumstances but also disappointment on how her life is evolving. Matten is creepy from his first frame while Hurst (best known for Sons of Anarchy) does a good job of filling a role that is rapidly growing because it needs to be subtle. And hot, such a person appears behind the second half the legend of cinema, no less than Beau Bridges, who plays the role of a man who has not yet resolved his internal trip in regrets for the past.
The cast is solid and Triplett, who was a visual effects coordinator in Hollywood before becoming a writer, provides good material to them. Clare feels as though she has to fight against invisible barriers that consistently increase the amount of tension that can be felt in the story and this is all the more the case as the movie goes on and the outlandishness of such obstacles only increases. When her credit card gets declined in the first act, at least in this stage of the film it can feel quite brutal. But by that time Clare is using that parking wall as a canvas to create peacock style artwork of her own version of the space time continuum, it is literally ancient history. It grows and grows as Desert Road turns into a small scale personal thriller, and then an ultimate outer space journey, but never losing the sweetness of the main character.
It is a well known fact that King doesn’t really know how to conclude his works and, in fact, any author who sets out to create such high level, brain melting concepts can easily miss the finish line. The ending that Triplett comes up with for Desert Road is not on par with what went before it, but as far as endings go it feels like a bit of a cop out. The film has not been without its share of headaches. Clare’s photography is significant thematically and literally in the plot of the movie but rather curiously, Triplett opts to ignore any of her pictures. (Perhaps she believed that they ought to be left up to the viewer’s imagination, which I wouldn’t necessarily subscribe to.) Yet, Desert Road is always engrossing even though many of the moments are not original, the concepts which have been done are presented in an interesting and novel way.
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