Day of John (16:08)
Dread Central; IMDb; Vimeo

This film tells the story of a man named John Travis, and three things that changed his life. One thing, which we see in flashback, happened when he was 15. I don't really want to go into any details about that, but I'm not really clear on how it changed his life, anyway. The second thing, in the present... well I'm not even entirely sure what the second thing was. See, we don't really hear any of the characters in the movie speak, the whole story is told by a narrator. And the narrative jumps around a lot, both in time and on whom the narrative focuses. That's kind of the best thing about the film, how we get to know just enough about the lives of various people to see how John's story fits together. (Oddly, it kind of put me in mind of The Brothers Karamazov.) But lots of things had happened to John that made his life pretty unbearable, recently. And now he's thinking of killing himself. Meanwhile, one of his neighbors has done something... well, supernatural. I don't really want to spoil exactly what it was, but that, along with some other random things that are going on, all come together to ultimately make John decide to live. (At the end of the film, the narrator tells us what the third thing was that changed his life, but that's sometime in the future, and not really important to the current story, except inasmuch as it... was something he had wanted to live for.)

Anyway... the movie is never really scary, or at least the horror parts weren't, in my opinion. The scene where John had a gun in his mouth was scary, in a much more ordinary, realistic way. But mostly the film seemed to be a comedy, albeit a rather dark one. Possibly the funniest bit was when the narrator matter-of-factly told us about the supernatural thing. I mean, nothing about the narrator's tone or manner of speaking ever changed, no matter what he was talking about. It gave the whole film the feel almost of a documentary, and it might as well have been about something completely mundane. The incongruity of that, vs. what was actually going on, is part of the film's charm. But that one moment was just where the whole tone of the film changed from drama to absurd horror was great. And there are lots of nice touches to the film, like how all these seemingly unconnected things fit together. And I dunno what else to tell you.