(IMAGE: nerve productions)
SP Distribution. 2021. Sci-Fi/Thriller. 83 minutes.
RATING: 2.5 / 4
It’s the goal of every beginning filmmaker working with almost no budget to come up with a story that can be primarily set in and around their apartment. And I’ve yet to meet the aspiring actor who doesn’t relish the chance to play a person going crazy. With Before I’m Dead, writer-director-producer-editor-actor J. R. Sawyers gets to do it all. Although it wasn’t conceived with COVID in mind, real-life lockdowns didn’t necessarily hurt this surreal portrait of agoraphobia, and in fact may well increase potential audience appreciation for the tale. The high watermark for this sort of thing is Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, which, needless to say, we are not getting here. But viewers who can attune themselves to the no-frills aesthetic might just find the story successfully creeps up on them.
Sawyers and his camera assistant Kristal Santos effectively set the tone with some city night shots that capture the brown-light, generic apartment complex blocks for miles that define the outskirts of cities like Los Angeles. Hollywood would never dare use settings this generic, and really only Michael Mann’s Collateral has ever tried to get that specific hue of brown in a major feature. But anyone who has ever lived or partied in such areas should instantly feel a visceral callback.
A more serious dramatic expansion of Sawyers’ 2010 horror short “The Sounds,” Before I’m Dead stars the aspiring auteur as Nolan Cruise, a haunted man who will no longer leave his apartment since his wife Carla (Camille Montgomery) was killed in a random mass-shooting that he somehow managed to survive. But what happens inside may prove infinitely worse than any external threats. Carla’s ghost still actively engages in conversation with him, objects relocate and vanish, the view through his phone camera proves very different than the things he sees with his eyes…and following what appears to be a minor meteorite-based earthquake, his bathroom seems to have become a time machine.
When Sawyers uses visual effects to make these work, they can sometimes look as if he got his (lack of) money’s worth. The simpler chills come from more basic tricks – a split screen to show Nelson in two places at once, for example, or people disappearing into walls via a well-timed fadeout. Obviously, we question whether any of what’s happening is real, or simply Nolan’s bad combo of PTSD, pills, and alcohol. And why does his neighbor keep complaining about the noise, when Nolan lives alone and isn’t making any?
I’m not sure I could fully spoil what happens if I tried, but even if everything isn’t entirely clear by the end, the story certainly navigates a more interesting path through the questions it sets up than the binary answers one might expect. If Sawyers – who is onscreen probably 95% of the time – occasionally seems distracted, well, it could be that he was wearing too many professional hats, but he can also plausibly chalk it up to the character being that way. I reckon I could bet with heavy certainty which scenes he dialed in his acting the most. Presumably this is all a function of budget and pandemic accessibility, but he could be a major force with a little more help to redistribute the workload.
More than a few viewers will likely reject Before I’m Dead out of hand for its homemade look. Commercially speaking, finding a way to make it found footage might have increased the viewership odds. But ultimately that wouldn’t have worked for where it goes, and Sawyers manages some impressive jump scares even within the technical limitations. Plus he saves some of the best visual effects for the end.
Given fewer limitations, I’m most interested to see what he does next as a writer. But he’s no slouch at the rest.
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