Gazer is a 2025 film  from first-time director Ryan J. Sloan, who shares writing credit with the film’s star, Ariella Mastroianni. Mastroianni portrays Frankie Rhodes, a woman with a progressive neurological disorder that distorts her memories, induces psychedelic dreams, and sends her into long blackout periods of lost time. She’s separated from her daughter Cynthia, whose current guardian is Diane, the mother of Frankie’s late husband, whose death was ruled a suicide but which Diane suspects Frankie had a hand in. Finding it difficult to hold down a job because of her degenerating condition, Frankie opens the movie being fired from her job as a gas station attendant due to perpetually zoning out in the middle of her shifts. The film takes its title from Frankie’s activities on the job, as she stares up at the building across the street, losing time while making up narratives about the people that she sees, Rear Window style. On the night that she’s fired, she sees an episode of violence happen in one of the windows. Frankie attends a grief group for people whose loved ones committed suicide, where a woman she saw leaving the building (Renee Gagner) approaches her. She introduces herself as Paige Foster and relates that her mother overdosed, and telling Frankie that her brother has since become overprotective, which prompted the domestic assault incident Frankie witnessed. Paige offers Frankie $3000 dollars to sneak into the apartment, get her car keys, and bring the car to her at a different location so she can flee her brother, and Frankie agrees. 

I’ve seen the film described as Hitchcockian, which is accurate. Beyond the shameless cribbing from Rear Window, the film takes on one of Alfred’s favorite elements, that of the wrongfully accused protagonist being pursued by the authorities while seeking to clear their name, and a Vertiginous series of mistaken identities. It’s also Lynchian, in that important information is revealed through surrealist dream sequences and characters that mirror one another or become confused with one another in esoteric, Mulhollandian ways, while psychedelic nightmare sequences pull from Twin Peaks for set and blocking inspiration. It’s also Cronenbergian, in that Frankie’s nightmares also often involve body horror imagery that’s directly taken from his catalog, and I do mean directly; there’s a shot of dream Frankie pulling an audiocassette out of a wound in her husband’s torso that’s so close to Videodrome that it might be legally actionable. 

If all of that sounds like this film is trafficking in too many ideas and lacks a cohesive creative vision, that’s because it is, and it does. It’s not a bad film at all, but it does have a lot of the hallmarks of being a freshman outing, and given that director Sloan has zero other credits on IMDb, it gives the impression that he emerged fully formed out of thin air as a filmmaker. Given that there’s no evidence of him getting any crew experience in the rest of his CV, this is even more impressive as a technical achievement, but its dependency on the use of other directors’ metaphorical color palettes means that, as a text, it fails to be more than the sum of its parts. There’s also a narrative device throughout the film in which Frankie listens to cassette tapes that she makes for herself, and the conceit never quite works, and it feels very much like a darling that the screenwriters couldn’t bring themselves to kill. It’s possible to excise the use of them in scenes like the one where Tape!Frankie is telling Present!Frankie not to linger too long in Paige’s apartment after getting her keys (a direction that Present! Frankie fails to follow, of course, and loses track of time) while also retaining the narrative throughline of Frankie recording journal entries for her daughter so that she can still communicate with her after her disorder takes her life as well as the scenes in which Frankie listens to previous recordings of Cynthia to keep herself company. As played in most scenes, however, the tapes are little more than a distraction in the scenes where Frankie listens to them “to focus,” and it feels like the hallmark of a director who’s too afraid to trust the audience as much as he should. 

That’s a shame, since the film has a lot going for it. The soundtrack is excellent, and perfectly meshes with the film’s overall sound design. There’s a really fantastic element in the visual design where all of the environments Frankie occupies while she’s dreaming are uncannily symmetrical, which is a nicely subtle way of playing with the narrative’s themes of mistaken identity and mirroring. I really sat up and paid attention when Dream!Frankie goes into her old house and opens a TV cabinet to find a one-eyed meat cube inside, the tongue of which Frankie pulls out like a magician’s endless string of handkerchiefs and then connects to her navel like a gross umbilical cord. Out of context, all of these dream sequences would work as their own individual horror shorts, and I appreciate that they don’t always mesh in a comprehensible way with Frankie’s real life decisions or memories, since it accurately reflects both her medical condition and the anxieties thereof. Mastroianni is also an odd but perfect choice for the lead. She’s quite petite, and the choice for Frankie to have a non-femme hair style renders her androgynous in a way that you rarely see in a main character unless it’s plot-mandated or narratively relevant. I found myself frequently frustrated with her choices in a way that threatened to make her impossible to root for, but not every lead has to be unchallenging. The film is also gorgeously photographed, with film grain artifacts and focus choices that make the film feel like it fell out of a time capsule from the New Hollywood era, so much so that when a newer version $100 bill or a cell phone pops up, you’re a little surprised. 

Where Gazer borrows too much from that New Hollywood era, however, is in its choice to be deliberately contemplative to an excessive degree. While in Paige’s apartment, Frankie looks down at the gas station where she used to work and we in the audience understand that this was the view that Paige and her attacker had the night of the assault; we don’t need to revisit this exact angle and reverse shot on Frankie on two additional occasions. I recently picked up a fun phrase from an old Siskel & Ebert episode that someone uploaded to YouTube, in which Roger criticized the performances in a certain film by saying that the actors were reciting their lines “like they had all day” to do it. I praised Mastroianni above, and while she’s usually quite good here, there are far too many scenes in which she enters and exits scenes with no energy at all, and it makes the film itself feel more sluggish, while Sloan leaves the camera running on some things like, as Roger would say, he had all to film it. Revelations about the central mystery happen quickly and get skipped over, while some scenes play out just shy of interminably, and I don’t think it’s quite the right choice. 

Gazer was recently added to Shudder, and you can find it there as of this writing. It allows its contemplation to get a little long in the tooth and the mystery itself is convoluted in a way that is going to leave a lot of viewers puzzled, but there are worse ways to spend an evening. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond