A DESERT - Mark Reviews Movies

A Desert, Dark Sky Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 1, 2025

The photographer's plan seems like a bad idea from the start, but co-writer/director Joshua Erkman's debut feature A Desert isn't simply about the shocks of revealing just how terrible a plan this is. The whole film seems haunted by something—some intangible quality of loneliness, despair, and desperation that has been brewing beneath the surface of the places where the photographer, as well as other characters, travels and the people who are drawn to these locales.

That makes this both a thriller, which does surprise in how the plot unfolds and unravels to find new threads, and a broader mood piece about the bleakness of both this land and humanity. Everything about the plot ultimately comes together in a fairly straightforward way, but because Erkman establishes and maintains that grim atmosphere so well, nothing about the conclusion feels tidy in any way. The film leaves these characters—or, at least, the ones who survive long enough to consider what they've witnessed and experienced—as empty as the spaces the photographer finds so photogenic.

He's Alex (Kai Lennox), by the way, and his career has reached a point that has left him questioning why he does it and how he might find the passion for his craft again. We learn, by way of some phone calls to his wife Sam (Sarah Lind), that the most satisfied Alex had ever been professionally was while shooting images for a photography book. It was filled with pictures from the American Southwest—vast deserts and small towns and places where people would gather for a good time.

Back then, these locations were already bare and sparsely populated, if at all. Returning to the same locales many years later, Alex finds dilapidated buildings from a housing project that was never fulfilled, an empty movie theater that has been cleared of any sign of what might have played there, and an abandoned military compound that only has minimal signs of what used to happen there. Erkman doesn't rush any of Alex's tour, as he looks for these spots and takes great pains to set up an old-fashioned manual camera with a slow shutter speed, counting down the seconds for the image to be captured on an actual plate.

The effect of these scenes is twofold. They create that overwhelming sense of desolation—of complete silence and the vacancy of these spaces—that permeates most of this story. On a more practical level for where the plot is heading, though, they also keep us on edge, because a noise here is unnerving, such as when Alex hears a crash in the projection booth of one of the auditoriums of the theater, and the sight of something—or someone—that doesn't belong in these open, empty spaces is even more so. That happens at the military base, by the way, where a man emerges from the building just as Alex drives away in his car.

Alex's plan makes some sense as a professional exercise. He has decided to do away with his cellphone and any GPS system while on his trip, using motel phones to check in with Sam at the end of each day. Since he's also and unwittingly in a different type of story, however, that only makes his situation more dangerous, especially when Renny (Zachary Ray Sherman) and his sister Susie (Ashley B. Smith) enter the tale. He meets them at one of those shady motels along the highway—hearing the two fight next door, calling the manager, finding himself shaken but gradually more comfortable when the two show up at his room and offer him a drink for the trouble their argument caused.

At this point, any account of Alex's story must end, because Erkman and Bossi Baker's screenplay does require some sense of surprise for it to function as a thriller. The whole narrative shifts perspective, though, to follow Harold (David Yow), a private investigator whom Sam hires to follow her husband's trail (Erkman and Baker have clearly been inspired by a famous thriller for both the general elements and plot structure of their own story, and while the name of that film won't be mentioned, most will catch it).

Like Alex, the detective is another man stuck in and lost on account of his past, and it's surely no coincidence that both men seem to find some allure in the same mysterious places and charmingly risky people. The same, perhaps, could even be said of Renny, who confides in Alex about his own family history and desire to exist outside of modern systems. On the surface, it all does look fairly romantic in a down-and-dirty and enigmatic sort of way—until, of course, the film peels back all of that to reveal the ugly core of it all. By the time anyone realizes that fact, it might be too late.

There are a few shocking turns and developments here, if only because the deliberate pacing of the film doesn't quite prepare us for them, they're inherently unsettling (especially when it comes to a mysterious man watching various monitors, what's on them, and how those images are created), and they are so definitive. A Desert, though, is disturbing on a level deeper than just how its plot proceeds, because it's as much about the potential emptiness of people, as a result of various circumstances and pushing them toward extreme ways to fill those voids, as it is the inherent creepiness of empty spaces.

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