Brightwood Review: A Divorcing Couple Falls to Pieces Amid Tedious Time Loop Shenanigans

Posted by Larita Shotwell on Saturday, March 9, 2024

Dane Elcar's strung out feature debut only has two characters, and neither one is very interesting.

Break-ups are often protracted sagas, littered with fading sympathy, belated realizations and a lot of dead air — all irritations that define Dane Elcar’s low-budget “Brightwood,” a sci-fi tall tale that follows a couple on the downslope of a marriage that becomes mysteriously ensnared in a time loop while jogging in the woods. Inelegantly extending the premise of his 2018 short “The Pond” to feature length, the writer-director quickly expends all interesting angles on his barebones premise. Though his feature debut is billed as a genre high-wire act, Elcar simply isn’t enough of an acrobat to put on a show.  

Jen (Dana Berger) is out for a jog, pumping herself up to the beat of a podcast about how to prepare for divorce. Dan (Max Woertendyke) is panting to keep up, gasping between apologies for being a messy drunk at the previous evening’s party, soiling what was supposed to be a celebration of his wife’s promotion. The blood-from-a-stone assignment Elcar creates for himself is finding an interesting dynamic between two people who no longer have any use for one another; there’s nothing left for Jen and Dan to exchange but antagonistic bickering.

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After a heated argument, the pair find themselves unable to leave the filthy pond that they’ve spent the morning around. Walking off the pathway only leads them back to the shoreline and the trail appears to have transformed into an unbroken loop. Their bad moods quickly turn into panic. The film sprinkles in a couple desperate signifiers — a growing pile of entangled earbuds, silent cloaked figures who don’t answer to greetings — to rack up some intrigue.

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“Brightwood” fails to find its footing because it appears to have little interest in the shared history between Jen and Dan, focusing instead on plotting loop-de-loops and a generic sense of dread. A long-term relationship reveals plenty of wounds that a partner can pour salt on, but nothing of that nature emerges in the story. For what plays as an hour-and-a-half-long argument, it’s remarkable that not a single vulnerability appears to be exposed between the two characters.

As the ball and chain of the couple, Berger is hardly allowed to stray from a flat snippiness, fielding groaners like “I’ve allowed you to have sex with me enough times that you have to be prepared to die for me.” Woertendyke gets a slightly richer assignment playing the ineffectual doofus husband, puttering about the modern miracles of hair regrowth medication and the nifty logic of the temporal phenomenon he finds himself in. Neither performance sustains credibility for long, but it’s not like either actor is given much to work with.

Despite fashioning himself a two-hander, Elcar puts most of his imagination working as the film’s sound designer. Jen and Dan (and viewers!) are dogged by a consistent ringing in their ears — an aural miasma that eventually metastasizes into echoes of the couple’s earlier conversations, as befits the anomalous time trap. Elcar fares far worse serving as his own editor, typically cutting back and forth between his two actors on each individual line reading. The results are stilted and awkward, providing no additional insight into scenes beyond the dialogue on the page.

Aside from some gory outbursts (that get sloppily cut around anyway), “Brightwood” has few ideas of how to keep things interesting. Its two characters begin as ill-defined stereotypes before the story flattens them further by reducing them to cavemen violence. Awkwardly enamored by the thin novelties of its sci-fi trappings, “Brightwood” doesn’t possess the imagination to blossom beyond them, occupying an unflattering intersection of modest production resources and unrefined form.

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‘Brightwood’ Review: A Divorcing Couple Falls to Pieces Amid Tedious Time Loop Shenanigans

Reviewed online, Aug. 17, 2023. Running time: 84 MIN.

  • Production: (U.S.) A Cinetopia Releasing release of a Pond Pictures production, in association with Noble Gas. (World sales: Media Move, Berlin.) Producers: Dane Elcar, Max Woertendyke.
  • Crew: Director, writer, editor: Dane Elcar. Camera: Dane Elcar. Music: Jason Cook.
  • With: Dana Berger, Max Woertendyke.

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