Slow Machine

The sense of mystery and dislocation is there from the beginning. A blond woman arrives at a country house where a band are recording, she speaks in an exaggerated Southern accent and the couple there call her Danielle, she’s fled the city and talks of “actual physical retribution”. But in a flashback to a few weeks earlier, the same woman sounds Swedish and answers to Stephanie, she’s an actress preparing to play an addled Texan on the run in a low budget movie. Gerard, the anti-terrorism cop in whose apartment she wakes up, has some strange turns of phrase himself, he says there’s nothing worse than a “deliberately-paced collective perishing”. Stephanie’s actress friend Chloe has had a bizarre audition of her own, delivering some immaculately composed lines in a random warehouse after the script literally goes up in flames; it wasn’t about the story, it was about the words. Both Danielle and Stephanie are reading Philip Larkin and this film works like some sort of performed poetry too, grainy scenes of wryly spooky recitation more about mood and feeling than plot, flowing into and bending back on one another at will, connected by the sort of “banal foreboding that niggles at you all day, every day”. To borrow Larkin’s words, you might call it an “unbeatable slow machine”. It brings you what you’ll get. (James Lattimer)

Paul Felten: SLOW MACHINE (2020)
Joe Denardo: IMA NEMA (2011, K), SLOW MACHINE (2020)