A very different kind of loop unfolds in Shannon Triplett’s very good “Desert Road,” a film that it truly feels that Rod Serling would have dug. “The Twilight Zone” regularly returned to travelers who break from reality, and that’s the basic template of Triplett’s film, a movie that consistently challenges perception of what’s really going on. Even at its conclusion, I’m not 100% it all adds up, but that’s fine for a film that’s more interested in how we move on than checking all the narrative boxes. Most of all, this is just a well-made mindf*ck of a movie, and a wonderful showcase for Kristine Froseth, who gives one of the best performances of SXSW 2024.
Froseth plays an unnamed woman traveling across one of those desolate patches of land in the Western part of this country where there’s little sign of civilization for miles. She stops at a gas station and has a somewhat unsettling encounter with a gas station attendant (Max Mattern) who may have skimmed her credit card. She drives off, calling home to Iowa and informing them that a long road trip is about to begin. It doesn’t. She blows a tire, getting stuck on a boulder. When she walks over the hill to the next gas station, she finds the one she left, with the same attendant. She calls a tow truck driver (Ryan Hurst), and then things start getting really weird. No matter where she goes, even off the road to another one that should be on the other side of a hill, she ends up back at the same gas station and the same broken-down car.
Getting stuck in time and space is an old idea in sci-fi, but it requires not just a sharp script but an engaging lead. Froseth keeps us in this complex story by anchoring us to her excellent performance, running with this woman down the desert road that she can never leave. There’s a bit of thematic inconsistency in Triplett’s script, especially when it shifts a bit in the final act to a story of closure more than survival, but it’s certainly never boring, the kind of film that could easily find a loyal audience with the right studio backing. A smart distributor should pick this one up while there’s still time.