THE BLUE ROSE - Mark Reviews Movies

The Blue Rose, Dark Sky Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 11, 2024

"Some art isn't meant to be understood but appreciated," a character says late in The Blue Rose. Writer/director/star George Baron's debut has made that point clear by the time the line arrives, because here's a movie that feels as if it makes less sense if one tries to understand anything of what's happening within it.

On a certain level, that must be the filmmaker's entire intention. This story, which begins as a murder mystery in the 1950s revolving around a pair of sort-of eccentric detectives, is as much about worlds of dreams/nightmares, alternate realities, and ghostly time travel as it is about who killed a cheating, abusive husband and why. Baron more or less answers the who of this puzzle right at the start, in a wordless prologue that shows an ordinary housewife's life crumbling in front of her, set to a deceptively peppy tune about a philandering husband.

With this sequence, Baron displays a strong visual style and sense of rhythm, as poor Sophie (Nikko Austen Smith) goes through the motions of baking pies for her neighbors and her hubby, realizes a pattern of the husband's absence from dinner, and can no longer even force a smile to cope with the misery. After the husband repeatedly hits her during an argument, something in Sophie seems to snap, and suddenly, she's pulling a knife out of her husband and leaving his body on the kitchen floor.

So it would seem, at least. We know the husband is dead. That's what sets Detectives Lilly (Olivia Scott Welch) and Dalton (Baron) on the trail of finding his killer. These two are a strange pair, who look young enough to think they're amateur sleuths, living out some childhood dream that resulted from taking a few too many Nancy Drew books to heart.

They drive around town in a bright pink convertible and talk in a way that sounds as if they're aware of how out-of-place they actually are. Talking with the local police chief (Ray Wise), the two ask why they can't just have the normal vehicle and resources of regular police detectives, and the only reasonable answer, perhaps, is that they have to be odd ducks so we comprehend just how improbable and uncertain this story will become.

The plot, such as it becomes, has the gumshoes tracking down Sophie, whom they assume to be the prime suspect after finding a letter in the mailbox to her sister that plainly states a motive for the murder. Along the way, they meet the sister, a well-to-do art gallery owner named Norma (Danielle Bisutti) who also commissions and collects unusual paintings, such as a black rabbit with a large cockroach hanging out the side of its mouth.

Is there some connection to the fact that we see a character with a black rabbit in a cage and a cockroach under a jar in his office? One guess is as good as any other. By the time the movie kind of reveals its realm of dreams and witnessed memories and things that might have happened or could be what actually are, we're well past such little puzzles and far into thoughts that, for all of Baron's low-budget flair and sense of the absurd, there's not much to dissect or digest in the bigger enigma of the nature of the story.

It's the sort of dreamy tale where almost every metaphor is literalized, from the detectives being confronted by figure in a moving bed to a psychiatric asylum, where the patients have familiar faces and/or names, pieces of art behind them make some point about their characters, and the head of the place explains that it's purgatory. Maybe it is, or perhaps, it just feels that way to her and everyone in it. There are moments of obvious dreams, such as when Dalton's wife Rose (Jordyn Denning)—who more or less comes out of nowhere and whose very existence is worthy of suspicion—is visited in the bathtub by Norma. There are locations and timelines that might only exist in dreams, such as the asylum and a night club where the bartender recognizes Dalton, even though the detective is certain this is the first time he's visiting the place.

Questions upon questions arise, and Baron assuring us that we shouldn't be too concerned with them—or scolding us for even thinking them—isn't much of a comfort within or an answer to The Blue Rose. The new filmmaker wears his influences on his sleeve (There's a specific filmmaker he almost certainly wants people to think of and mention in discussing the movie, and we'll just leave it at that), but the surrealism of this material seems to exist for its own sake and little to nothing else.

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