TILT / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: KASRA FARAHANI / SCREENPLAY: KASRA FARAHANI, JASON O’LEARY / STARRING: CHRISTIAN CALLOWAY, ELIJAH COLLINS, JOSEPH CROSS / RELEASE DATE: TBC
An unemployed documentary maker slowly goes off the rails during his wife’s pregnancy and Donald Trump’s presidency. Certainly, these are stressful times, but there’s no excuse for Joe’s increasingly dominant murder fantasies. What follows is some indie version of Falling Down for the Trump generation; Joker meets American Horror Story: Cult.
This bleak drama by director Kasra Farahani is a deep and leisurely character study of white American masculinity gone wrong; misplaced rage and resentment, and the fear of letting down one’s family. A family that one isn’t even sure if one wants. Joseph Cross shoulders leading man duties well, and his portrait of a man falling apart is a plausible one. But this kind of story has been told many times before, and plastering Donald Trump’s ugly mug everywhere doesn’t make it any more original or warranted. It just makes Tilt yet another thing with Donald Trump’s stupid face and voice all over it.
Well-made as the film undeniably is, it’s predictable and by the numbers, lacking in visual and storytelling invention. While there are still stories to be told about angry white men having murder breakdowns (this year’s Piercing, for example – or, yes, Joker), it’s not enough to just slap Donald J. Trump all over it. For all its rage and fury, Tilt doesn’t have quite as much to say as it thinks it does. As murder breakdown movies go, this one is depressingly banal, ugly and particularly uninspired. But then, that hasn’t really stopped the presidency of you-know-who thus far, either. Far from Falling Down, this is the generic rip-off that the Trump generation deserved all along.
