Billy (Zachary Epcar, 2019) (Patreon)

Billy is a talkie.

Epcar is one of the most interesting among the current crop of younger filmmakers, in part because his stock in trade seems to be a collection of ineffable moods. He's a bit like Laida Lertxundi and Jennifer Reeder in this respect, although thus far, Epcar is a bit harder to place. His film Return to Forms was a study of varying textures of manufactured goods, a kind of catalog of prefab shells and skins on display for the voracious consumer. Epcar's next effort, Life After Love, took place in a field of parked cars at dusk (possibly a ferry, but I am still not sure), catching the sun glinting off the vehicles as we observe the melancholy, distracted humanoids inside. Both films are exquisite engines of affect, inducing a palpable sense of the vast unsaid.

Given Epcar's adeptness as managing atmosphere and mise-en-scène, it's not altogether surprising that he has decided to produce a more performance-based, para-narrative work. Billy could perhaps be considered a suburban trance film, in that it adheres to a certain dream logic in exploring the unconscious longing and dread lurking beneath an otherwise unexceptional middle-class white heterosexual scenario. Billy (Peter Christian) awakes from a nightmare in which masculine encouragement turns into goading; his partner Allison (Kym McDaniel) is sympathetic but doesn't quite know how to reach him.

Epcar operates in fragments here, never telling us a straightforward story, even though certain motifs -- Allison's Amazon packages, the possible intruder in the house, the wildlife in the woods around their home -- are all suggestive of the notion of the domestic space as a membrane that is highly, disturbingly permeable. If Billy is ultimately not as satisfying as Epcar's previous films, it's largely because it simultaneously offers both too much and too little. The filmmaker's sharp, gestural editing is certainly in place, providing the impression of a story told through the cracks and interstices rather than the primary details. 

But at the same time, some of Epcar's amber-and-cobalt ambiance, when placed within a narrative context, feels a bit self-consciously retro, as if what in earlier films had been moody and diffuse is now functioning ironically. This is probably not intentional, and I'm sure other viewers will have differing reactions. But it seems to me to be a side-effect of recontextualizing something as fragile as poetic film style. When the dreamy becomes the "dreamy," an actual signifier for the presence of our dreams, it can lose a bit of its potency, in much the same way that the thin envelope of the uncanny can rupture when exposed to a simple explanation.