Skew
Director Seve Schelenz’s award-winning film SKEW tackles relationships, secrets, and mysterious murders all wrapped in the cinema verité style. The film, starring Richard Olak, and Amber Lewis as couple Rich and Eva, and Robert Scattergood as their friend and man-behind-the-camera Simon are on a road trip to be in their friend’s wedding. Along the way their friendship and sanity are tested as several mysterious and deadly occurrences follow them at every rest stop and tourist attraction.
The movie takes a little while to get moving as the characters and premise are introduced, but once they get on the road and the weirdness starts, it doesn’t let up. Seve does a great job at building tension and sustaining the story, giving his characters more depth and personality than their PARANORMAL ACTIVITY counterpart that this movie is often compared to. In a world where the “found footage” plot has been done to death it’s a real testament to the director that his film doesn’t feel like his shaky-cam contemporaries, instead standing apart as a movie with actual narrative that doesn’t just rely on camera tricks and allows the story to develop rather than giving us jump scares through the movie. The film actually reminds me more of another indie movie shot similarly that we reviewed (here) called LUNOPOLIS.
The acting is pretty solid even when, in reality, there is no way any group of friends wouldn’t have kicked the crap out of each other, or at the very least bailed on the wedding they were supposed to attend once the body count starts to pile up. The inter-character relations, and the secrets they hold from each other, really adds to the reality and tension in each scene. As Simon slides deeper into insanity and his friends grow more agitated, you almost forget about the supernatural elements of SKEW until they literally pop up suddenly.
The cinematography is exactly what you would expect with a move filmed in the cinema verité style. The camera occasionally jumps around, and sometimes lets the action happen while facing in some direction other than where the characters are, but I’ve decided to not slam SKEW for this, as no one said anything when Tarantino did a similar cinematic move twenty years prior in RESERVOIR DOGS in the classic ear-cutting scene. It allows the audience to make up their own mind of what’s happening in the scene, which can often be a more powerful image than what a screenwriter can conjure up.
SKEW is a fun ride right up to the end, where it does get a little too complicated, and honestly, not gory enough. I was expecting more of an ending that films of a similar ilk use to give the audience that one last big scare. While I was disappointed to not have that, I was very impressed with the deliberateness of Seve’s direction. You can tell that each shot in the film leading up to the end shot was done with great care, something that most shaky-cam flicks, at least in the indie world, don’t seem to take as much care to do.
