Scalene

Director and co-writer Zack Parker sets the stage for his perceptual thriller with a haggard looking mother Janice Trimble (Emmy award winning actress Margo Martindale) breaking into a young girl’s home brandishing a loaded gun and chasing her through the house until they have a climactic confrontation that leads to the opening credits. We don’t know why these events are happening yet, but Parker and co-writer Brandon Owens use the disjointed scene to suck you right into SCALENE's complex narrative.

Hanna Hall (HALLOWEEN, FORREST GUMP, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES) plays young caregiver Paige Alexander who is hired by Janice to take care of her mentally disabled son Jakob; played with an honesty and naivete that Sean Penn should take an acting class from by Adam Scarimbolo (A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS, The Sopranos). Paige is getting ready to move on in her own life and needs money to leave home. She answers an ad by Ms. Trimble for an in-home caregiver where she meets Jakob, a silent and gentle 26-year-old boy who became disabled after huffing too much paint thinner when he was younger. Paige starts to see signs of abuse in the Trimble household and forms a bond with Jakob, and schemes to get him away from his possibly abusive mother.

But that is only one side of the story being told in this movie. From the perspective of Janice, Paige is the one intruding on their household, and the one who is acting unprofessionally toward her son. Matters become more complicated for Janice as she starts to date again, and finds her social life is stunted by her son’s disability. When her son is taken away from her after it is reported that he possibly raped Paige, she goes crazy, buys a gun, and we pick up where the opening scene in the movie started.

Parker and Owens do a great job exploring the different points of view of the main characters in SCALENE and expertly interweave their stories throughout the film. They paint their characters in shades of grey versus the black and white good and evil characters that a lazier writer would have written them as. With a cast of experienced actors and actresses in this film there is nothing negative to really say about the quality of the performances. Margo hits her role out of the park and Hanna’s performance and transformation throughout the film should qualify her for an award too. The understated genius of Adam’s performance is difficult to explain without actually seeing him portray his character in SCALENE. Jakob felt real, and also as interesting and expressive a character as any of the others even though he has no dialogue throughout the movie. The composition of the movie in general is really well done with expert cinematography (I personally enjoyed the camera movement homage to Hitchcock’s PSYCHO shower scene towards the end of the film) and lighting. There are a couple areas where the pacing could have been picked up, and the director could have probably shaved about 5 minutes of footage from the final cut, but overall, this film is thought-provoking, incredibly well acted, and the type of film that the festival circuit and distributors should definitely keep an eye out for.