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DIRECTED BY: Alex Ross Perry

FEATURING: Riley O’Bryan, Kate Lyn Sheil, Bruno Meyrick Jones, voice of Eugene Mirman

PLOT: A lone soldier trudges through the forest in search of a pair of V-2 rockets, but consistently loses his way thanks to a combination of tiredness, apathy, and a series of hallucinated distractions.

COMMENTS: Like many filmmakers before him, Alex Ross Perry broke in with a microbudgeted, limited cast, one-set, single-premise film to demonstrate his talent. These “calling cards” can provide a fascinating peek into an extraordinary career poised to explode. (I have reviewed one such example on this very site.) Perry’s introduction keeps things pretty simple, from a production standpoint. It’s as a storyteller that he shows an unusually high level of ambition, given that he’s decided that his debut feature is the right place to attempt an unsanctioned adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” No quickie horror film for him.

Having never attempted the literary Everest that is Pynchon’s most acclaimed work myself, I take it on faith that shared character names, common elements (missile numbers, octopi, bananas), and a similarly surreal milieu speak to the faithfulness of Perry’s covert adaptation. The secretive author has only been officially translated to the screen once, but since Perry includes the novel amongst several nonfiction works in an end-credits bibliography, we can stipulate its influence here. What suffers in the translation to a visual medium is the nature of its central character, a feckless fellow who may seem introspective on the page, but comes across as lethargic or even clueless on the screen. Tyrone (Riley O’Bryan) stumbles around the forest in no particular direction, mumbling in a grand display of Gen Z-style elocution. His ostensible goal is to collect two precious German rockets as part of a secret military operation (although his targets are mere models rather than the actual four-story missile that paved the way for modern rocketry), but having located one of the pair, he seems to have no prospects for finding the second rocket, and has a hard enough time keeping hold of the first. When he’s not toting or spooning the wayward projectile, he’s fending off the intrusions of people who categorically cannot be there, including a one-eyed Australian who gives off Raoul Duke vibes, an old colleague who is also evidently an escaped criminal, and an octopus who shows up just for the hang. And so he wanders, going nowhere and fending off plot development like a mystery box TV show with no definitive end date.

There’s strong reason to believe that we’re watching the dream—or possibly the Jacob’s Ladder-style final moments—of our hero, possibly moments after perusing Pynchon’s novel while eating too much spicy food. Aside from Tyrone, no one dresses in period garb. At one point, he reads from the secret files which dictate his mission, but when it comes time to identify the superiors who have sent him on this assignment, he formally reports, “I cannot say, I’m afraid. That would be telling.” He describes himself as having unique abilities for the task at hand, but never demonstrates that he has any skills at all. He doesn’t have a compass, his orders contain maps of Scandinavia and irrelevant photographs, and he never comes across the slightest trace of the wider world beyond the forest. Tyrone is perpetually on his own with no direction home, and he displays very little interest in improving his lot.

The most frequent interruption in his wanderings is the repeated intrusion of Katje, the girlfriend he left behind and whose biggest contribution seems to be as a nagging harpy throwing cold water on his efforts. But Katje finally gets her turn in a nine-minute sequence near the film’s end where she lays bare his cruelties. It’s a crucial shift in perspective, as it provides her only opportunity to speak her mind as a real human instead of a wet blanket. It also calls into question the very nature of Tyrone’s mission, as the flashback appears to take place in the now rather than in the ostensible World War II-era setting we expect. When Katje returns one last time to try and advise Tyrone, she appears as a protector instead of a critic. But this is the story’s last new element before it stumbles toward the closing credits, and it reads as a twist rather than as a legitimate pathway. In any event, Tyrone pays her no heed. His fate is fixed. The forest is the end. 

Perry’s Pynchonesque journey benefits from uniqueness, as there aren’t too many narratives where the hero actively goes nowhere and does nothing. But there’s not really any reward for coming along for the ride. Without a central character to be interested in, an objective to be achieved, or intriguing visuals or occurrences to capture a viewer’s attention, Impolex is aimless and dull. We are all Katje, fruitlessly waiting all night for someone to come home. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Reveling in its provocative absurdity, ‘Impolex’ is a madly uncommercial head-scratcher that will strike a dream-logic chord in some viewers and leave others in a ‘My kid could do better than that’ mood… a nine-minute single-take closeup of a woman (Kate Lyn Sheil), delivering a weirdly revelatory monologue, unexpectedly catapults the film to another level, breaking viewers’ otherwise understandable alienation.” – Ronnie Scheib, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Dwarf Oscar. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)