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The Diver is used with permission from Jamie Helmer and Michael Leonard. Learn more at http://omele.to/3ctIml6.
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Callan is a young man living with his parents, helping them grow and sell vegetables. He likes diving in the waters of his coastal community, where he feels calm and relaxed.
But there is something off about Callan. He doesn’t quite relate to the people around him, and he struggles with violent, aggressive urges that come out in unexpected moments. His father attempts to rein in Callan by occupying him and keeping an eye on him constantly — but it may not be enough anymore.
Brooding and atmospheric, with haunting, eerie images, this Oscar-longlisted drama — directed by Jamie Helmer and Michael Leonard, who is also doubles as screenwriter — is an uneasy family portrait of an antisocial young man and the father who is trying to rein in his son’s impulses, with diminishing returns.
The visuals are uniquely stunning, with a painterly sense of color and luminous lighting that captures the placidity of the community where Callan and his family live. But the images also communicate the odd disjointedness of Callan’s subjectivity. The compositions are often subtly skewed and off-balance — single shots of characters have slightly more space above the head than typical, for instance — and eye-lines and glances don’t quite match. The visual dislocation creates a world where the characters, and especially Callan, don’t quite connect with one another, and as one hypnotic image after another unfurls, they gain a collective power, building a dark, suggestive atmosphere of alienation.
While the images are pristine and rich, the storytelling is spare and often poetic, with plenty of room for space and silence punctuated by sharp, telling details. Many of these details are character moments, like gestures and expressions held in moments of solitude. Actor Nicholas Denton as Callan effectively builds up his performance from these small moments, capturing how Callan just doesn’t quite fit in with the world and people around him. His father, played by John Brumpton, radiates a stern strength but also a growing suspicion and unease that Callan is proving increasingly difficult to contain.
At first Callan’s misalignment with the world around him feels benign, but as the story creeps forward — threaded together with a disquieting atonal ambient score and a strange repeating underwater image that gives the film its title — Callan gains in menace, with a coiled urge to violence that becomes more uncontrollable. When Callan’s aggression becomes directed in a more direct, personal way, it proves a turning point, pointing to a dark destination.
"The Diver" builds up one small psychological mystery after another, with one often leading to the next. And while the story’s climax isn’t explosive, there’s enough tension and fear to leave a lasting, lingering dread at the conclusion. The ending is ambiguous and indeterminate, at least where the film itself leaves off. But viewers come away with a sense that things will not end well, and the peaceable beauty of this life will rupture with a barely contained threat that looms well past the story’s ending.
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A young man can’t control his violent impulses. So his father keeps an eye on him. | The Diver
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Original Author: Produced by Omeleto and published on 03/02/2021 Source