Frankie (Ariella Mastroianni) listens to cassette tapes to help maintain her focus. The Gazer lead’s dyschronometria—an impaired ability to accurately measure or estimate time—makes her mind wander, making it hard to keep a job down and, it would seem, difficult to be a mother, as her mostly off-screen daughter appears to be living with her mother-in-law.
But Frankie tries to maintain concentration, often by engaging in voyeurism. One night, while getting caught up gazing instead of being attentive to her gas station job, Frankie witnesses what seems like a domestic incident in an apartment across the street. Later, Frankie would see the woman involved co*e into her support group for people who have lost loved ones to suicide. Claire (Renee Gagner) introduces herself and asks Frankie why she was watching her the other night. Frankie is up-front about her medical justification for voyeurism while still being emotionally guarded. They quickly take a liking to each other, and soon Claire asks Frankie for help in getting out of dodge away from her abusive brother. But things start to go awry, making one wonder just how trustworthy Claire is as a new “friend,” and furthermore, how reliable Frankie might be as a narrator.
Gazer has high aspirations as a conceptual thriller. Its grainy 16mm texture—shot by Matheus Bastos—harkens back to paranoid days of ‘70s thrillers, where all allegiances can be false and every turn makes you rethink the last. Specifically, director Ryan J. Sloan and Mastroianni (who co-wrote the film) seem to connect Gazer with a spiritual trilogy of perspective: Blow-Up, The Conversation, and Blow Out, which the pair programmed as a series to play along with Gazer during the film’s run at their distributor’s parent theater, Metrograph. Those films co*pose a lofty lineage to reach for as a first-time filmmaker, as each of those thrillers have been argued as their illustrious auteurs’ (Michelangelo Antonioni, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma, respectively) greatest works, not to mention high cinematic watermarks for the decades they released in. Part of what makes these films such masterpieces is their ability to reflect back the anxieties of their eras through their breakdowns of genre conventions. This adds another layer of unfairness when co*paring Gazer to any of these, given that its formal intentions are to throw back rather than pace forward.
From aesthetic decisions like the film grain often falling apart on itself, to narrative justifications for why the film avoids cell phones (screens aren’t good for her condition, Frankie tells Claire), Gazer tries to separate itself from the constraints of contemporary thrillers. Since the day of the films Gazer takes as inspiration, the world has transitioned from physical interfaces to digital ones that are simply harder to represent on film. Instead of confronting those issues, Gazer works to avoid them. That’s not to say the film doesn’t succeed as a genre exercise in that throwback way, but it doesn’t have much going on under the hood past a desire to perform that exercise.
There are some plot twists, including a pleasantly surprising genre turn (although, into a new one that most people would not describe as pleasant). These turns work in an immediate way, partly through how the audience is brought into Frankie’s story ex-vacuo—from the blackness of the screen before the film starts, we see the world of the picture through the perspective of our heroine. Watching from her often unmoored perspective, the audience is initially drifting as much as her, then works to keep up with the plot despite her unreliability.
If that is the aspiration of the film—an experiment in perspective, with little to say about it—then Gazer meets its middling ambitions. There is certainly talent in front of and behind the camera, although it works more like a demonstration rather than reaching for something more co*pelling. Gazer shoots the moon for The Conversation but lands closer to Memento, a film that holds itself together with how much fun it can have with its narrative and formal conceit rather than lingering on its thematic implications. Gazer isn’t a failure, but it is obligatory—a way to express ability rather than a work of art that exists out of the necessity to express.
Director: Ryan J. Sloan
Writers: Ryan J. Sloan, Ariella Mastroianni
Stars: Ariella Mastroianni, Marcia Debonis, Renee Gagner, Jack Alberts, Tommy Kang
Release date: April 4, 2025