by Victor Pryor
On The Horizon had its world premiere July 31, 2015 at Fantasia Fest 2015.
On The Horizon pivots on a very risky gambit, which doesn’t entirely pay off. But in its finest moments, it really captures something about the dreadful inertia of passion, and how often it can be mistaken for true love.
The first images are of a man. Grooming. Shadowboxing. Playing video games. Seducing. He shares an intimacy with his pretty blonde lover.
The phone rings. A familiar voice.
“Aaron and I split up.”
Which is basically all it takes for the man to hop in his car and drive, leaving his lover without so much as a backwards glance.
Casey (Tyler Johnson) and Elissa (Sandy Leddin) reunite and frolic in the desert. He moves in for the kiss, but she dodges, leading him to a waterfall where they make love.
This is pretty much their relationship in a microcosm.
And it quickly becomes clear that this could go no other way; their happiness only exists in montage form, in the silent spaces where they can shut reality out.
But almost immediately upon their return to society, the old rot sets in.
Casey (who has the sort of brooding affectations and stupid floppy hair that are like catnip to a certain breed of woman), wants more than Elissa is willing to give. And this has clearly been the pattern for as long as they’ve known each other. He pushes and she runs.
Everybody has at least one Casey and one Elissa in their history. Worse they’ve almost inevitably been someone else’s.
There’s a nifty inversion to the way the film plays out: at first, it seems to be the story of a femme fatale, wreaking havoc and breaking the heart of the man whose only crime was wanting to know her. But as the story progresses, some less savory aspects of Casey get revealed, and Elissa slowly begins to discover the limits of her capacity for permanent restlessness.
They are, of course, both vaguely insufferable. But Johnson fares worse in this regard; his character gets pushed too far past the point of maintaining empathy, and he has to keep hitting the same notes over and over. The sloe-eyed Leddin, however, starts out as luminous and unknowable and ends up exposed and desolated, which is a much more interesting journey. Her line delivery is hit-or-miss, but her physical performance is subtle and shaded.
The very existence of the film is, in itself, a triumph. Shot on an shockingly low budget with a crew of three (director Pascal Payant, sound recorder, and assistant), the movie looks far better than its low budget and tiny crew would indicate. Visually speaking, it’s easily the match of many bigger budget indies, and arguably superior. While there’s a bit of the typical indie handheld style-itis, Payant has chosen some fantastic outdoor locations to shoot in and his camera placement in the interior spaces subtly reveal the alienation of the people who fill them.
More importantly for such a character driven story, he invests most of his energy in capturing the tiny, human moments that give the story more depth than the often blunt force platitudes of the dialogue.
This is best shown in the side performances by Kristen Kerr as Elissa’s friend Kate and Jade Harlow as Christine, the stunning new girl who might be exactly the person Casey needs (and Johnson’s performance improves greatly in their scenes together). Neither gets a lot of screen time but they both make indelible, hugely charming impressions in their brief scenes. Kerr is particularly funny as she needles Casey with her clearly rehearsed monologue about the futility of monogamy.
Everybody has their own particular brand of philosophical hokum that they use to justify whatever self-defeating action they feel like taking in the moment. But ultimately, it’s sybaritic hanger-on Sebastian (Emmanuel Curtil, alternately ridiculous and terrifying), who utters the line every other character wishes they could say with conviction: “It’s me who decides.”
Which leads to the aforementioned gambit, where an obscene amount of tension is wrung from a ringing phone and the audience unexpectedly finds itself rooting for two basically horrible people to break a vicious cycle. There’s an ambiguity to how it all works out, but if nothing else, it’s remarkable how Payant manages to evoke such strong feelings without the audience even realizing it’s happening.
On The Horizon isn’t entirely successful as a film. A lighter touch would have done wonders, and the surprisingly affecting cumulative nature of the film is a difficult investment to argue for when the two main characters are so unpleasant to be around so much of the time. But when it works, it really captures something about the nature of desire. Payant is a talent to watch.
