A Desert (USA 2024: Dir Joshua Erkman)

I've spent quite a bit of time in the USA over the years, not only in the cities but also the country's less populated regions. One thing that anyone visiting the quieter bits of the place can't help but feel is the sense of isolation, and how easy it could be for a person to just get lost.

Joshua Erkman's debut feature A Desert may not be the first movie to exploit this anxiety, but as a mood piece about broken Americana and the people who live in it, it's kind of hard to beat.

Photographer Alex Clark (Kai Lennox), hoping to reclaim some of his glory days, sets out on a one person road trip to record the abandoned parts of his country; when we first meet him he's scoping out an empty, long closed cinema, whose blank screens will be important later in the film. Back home Alex's long suffering wife Sam (Sarah Lind) supports the couple financially and hopes that her husband has one more book of photographs in him.

But Alex perhaps forgets that, in and around those photogenic broken landscapes, people still live. Which he finds out after booking a motel and complaining to the grungy owner about a violent domestic happening in the next room. The noisy neighbour in question, the initially obsequious but quietly threatening Renny (Zachary Ray Sherman) takes one look at Alex's analogue equipment, whips out some moonshine and suggests that the photographer use he and his 'sister' Susie (Ashley B. Smith) as subject matter. This encounter doesn't end well.

Some days later a quietly distraught Sam, fed up with the local police's efforts to find her now missing husband, engages a dodgy private investigator, Harold (David Yow), to do what the cops can't. Harold ends up retracing Alex's steps, which includes a run in with Renny.

Erkman assembles all the elements you'll have seen before in any one of a number of American indie genre movies; psychopathic loner, grizzled private dick, local characters (Rob Zabrecky's motel owner is quietly effective in his few brief scenes) and a desert landscape breathtakingly beautiful in its emptiness. But the director has something more to say than just playing out the drama suggested by this setup. He's concerned with spectacle; how people view others and their surroundings and, importantly, the image, both moving and still. Yes, that does mean that Erkman strays into that territory staked as 'Lynchian' - the endless highway, the inscrutability of evil - but it's not shameless copying, despite the surreal, borderline supernatural goings on.

A Desert starts and ends with a camera; in between it's a drama about ruined buildings, already ruined people, and those headed in that direction. An enigmatic and impressive debut.

A Desert is on UK and Ireland digital platforms from 24 November