Mark Reviews Movies: THE QUARRY (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 16, 2020

A sort of ambling examination of guilt, The Quarry is so drenched in mystery and mundaneness that its story never makes a tangible impact. As for the actual plot, the screenplay by director Scott Teems and Andrew Brotzman (based on Damon Galgut's novel) is filled with coincidence upon coincidence, plenty of contrivances, and characters missing the obvious facts right in front of them or jumping to unlikely conclusions. The combination of Teems' laidback approach and the script's mechanics is a strange one.

We almost get the feeling that the filmmakers' intentions are more allegorical than they are in line with a straightforward kind of mystery/thriller. The starting point is the discovery of a never-named man, played by Shea Whigham, unconscious on the side of the road by a minister, played by Bruno Bichir, traveling to his next parish assignment.

The minister cares for the stranger, gives him a meal, and tends to his soul. He's repaid by the stranger hitting him with a bottle, killing him, and burying his body in the dirt of a quarry. The stranger then drives into the nearby town, where the minister was supposed to take over the local church, and pretends to be his victim.

Surprisingly, there isn't much suspicion about the man. Moore, the local police chief played by Michael Shannon, takes the fake minister at his word, even though there was a picture of the same man—wanted for murder and arson—on the wall behind him, until the man removes it. The cop notices the blank space on the wall, and although he seems to put the pieces together in his mind, he spends the rest of the movie as unaware as he begins it.

Celia (Catalina Sandino Moreno), who lives with and tends to the local pastor, doesn't find the newcomer or his behavior odd at all, either. She's having an affair with Moore, and that, along with her own religious convictions, seems to be the thing on her mind the most when it comes to the new pastor. He won't judge her, he says. He's a sinner, too—a fact that comes to define his various sermons the growing congregation at the church, only one of whom speaks English and translates the pastor's words for the other parishioners.

None of them finds their minister's focus on unnamed sins from the past to be odd. Indeed, he gains quite the following of people who are convinced that they're like "dirt." Moore, who complains about how nice things used to be in this town before the highway arrived a few miles away and sent a certain segment of the population moving toward it, might have something to do with the locals' feeling of uncertainty, self-deprecation, and misery.

Only two local drug dealers, brothers Valentin (Bobby Soto) and Poco (Alvaro Martinez), think there's something off about the new minister. After all, they steal things from the man's van, find a bloody shirt, and discover the real minister's rotting corpse next to their marijuana crop.

Here, things become so simplified that they basically transcend simplification to become convoluted. The chief assumes that the brothers are responsible for the killing of the real minister, whose identity no one but the fake minister actually knows. Valentin is arrested, and Poco goes on the run.

The stranger remains quiet, and even though it's really eating his conscience that an innocent man might take the blame for his crime, he stays silent, building up a larger congregation and even presiding over the funeral for the man he murdered. Moore says that his father, who also was a cop, told him that the person who doesn't belong at a murdered man's funeral is probably the one who did the killing. It's only him and the fake minister at the funeral, though, and in Moore's mind, they both belong there.

Either these characters are pretty dumb, or Teems has something else in mind with this material. It feels as if the latter is the more likely option, if only because the screenplay evades all of the obvious moves that this plot could have taken. The stranger doesn't have to do too much to cover up his crime (He burns the minister's ID, and that pretty much covers any trace of him). The people of the town—in blindly accepting what's presented to them or, in the case of Moore, ignoring what should be obvious—do almost all of the work for him, simply by not questioning his presence, his actions, and his words.

Whigham's performance of the stranger as a blank slate, only given to emotion just before killing the minster, adds another layer to the proposition that there's more to this story than its mechanics. He comes across as symbol of inherent privilege, protected from any form of scrutiny, instead of an actual character.

Essentially, the story is set up as a typical thriller, but it's obvious that Teems is unconcerned with such fundamental plot requirements. Despite the filmmakers' efforts to transform this tale into a reverse Kafka-esque nightmare, in which a guilty man is presumed innocent for no discernable reason, The Quarry never really makes its intentions clear.

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