Mark Reviews Movies: THE STANDOFF AT SPARROW CREEK

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 17, 2019

One at a time, seven men enter an old lumber mill. With the entrance of each one, a new piece of information arrives. There has been a shooting. All of them know that from the start. At least two of them were able to hear the crackling of distant gunfire and the occasional boom of an improvised explosive device.

The next detail arrives: The shooting was at a cemetery. Another piece connects to the rest of the puzzle: It was during a police funeral. The weapon that was used is the kind to which all of these men have access. There is, after all, a makeshift armory in the mill, filled with store-bought semi-automatic rifles modified to be automatic weapons, plenty of ammunition, and body armor. All of those things were used in the shooting, which has left several cops dead or wounded.

The final detail, perhaps, is the most relevant: Unlike most public shooters, this one did not commit suicide after realizing what he had done. This shooter has escaped. Based on the information at hand, the seven men, all part of a militia group in northern Michigan, would be considered prime suspects by the police.

The only people who knew how to access the armory have gathered here. Each one has an alibi of a varying degree of believability. The group has to figure out which one of their members perpetrated crime and turn him over to the police, before the cops come calling to find a heavily armed militia group with clear signs of intent for executing this attack or some assault in the future.

This is the basic setup of writer/director Henry Dunham's The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, which serves as a humdinger of a mystery, a thriller of smoldering tension, and a morally ambiguous examination of the mentality of this group of resentful, angry outsiders. It's an assured first feature, based almost exclusively on conversations, debates, and interrogations among its cast of characters, set within an isolated locale that seems claustrophobically enclosed at the start and slowly starts to feel like a tomb.

Dunham obviously takes the less-is-more approach with this material, providing a plot that can be summed up in a single, simple sentence (Seven men try to determine which of them perpetrated a terrorist attack) but ensuring that the simplicity ends there. There's the richness of the screenplay's dialogue, which always possesses the just-shy of stylized flair of hyper-naturalism, while still doing the double duty of simultaneously explaining the plot and revealing the nature of these characters.

There are the assorted twists and turns, as characters who seem or say that they're guilty turn out to be innocent and lead us to suspect someone else, and even those revelations are as much about the inner workings of these men as they are about the mechanics of the story. Even the location, which seems as sparse as can be, plays a role here, with all-encompassing florescent lighting shifting toward selective work lights, as the truth of what happened seems to get further away from everyone. Jackson Hunt's cinematography, which uses the industrial setting to backlight the characters and bathe them in oppressive shadows, is gorgeous in a very unassuming way.

The casting, too, displays a certain level of confidence. The characters are played almost exclusively by an assortment of character actors of various generations. The most recognizable actor here is James Badge Dale, who himself has become something of a character actor as of late. He plays Gannon, a former cop who has since become a militia member, in a particularly robust performance of inherent intelligence and just-beneath-the-surface anger.

Gannon, of course, becomes the militia's go-to guy for determining who attacked the funeral. He has experience interrogating criminal suspects, and even before he was a member of the militia, the ex-cop had been invested in the ways of such organizations and the thinking of people who would join them. Gannon was an undercover detective in a former life, and Ford (Chris Mulkey), this group's leader, likes to keep Gannon around because it keeps them "clean" from infiltration.

As for the other members/suspects, there's Beckmann (Patrick Fischler), the militia's resident technology expert, who has rigged a device to ping if a police radio frequency approaches the mill. His alibi is tighter than the others'. There's also Hubbel (Gene Jones), an older man with a violent past, which he recounts at one point with a frightening sense of matter-of-fact righteousness. The characters here are often shot at low angles, giving them a sense of power that only exists in their minds.

Gannon's primary suspects, though, are Morris (Happy Anderson), the former member of a white supremacist gang who later reveals a possible motive for committing the attack, and Keating (Robert Aramayo), a quiet loner who keeps a diary/manifesto scrawled over the text of a famous novel and who knows as much about interrogation techniques as his own interrogator. Ford suspects the group's seventh member Noah (Brian Geraghty). Gannon knows Noah is innocent for a reason he can't divulge to the group, because Gannon also has a reason to care about Noah's safety. Meanwhile, the local attack has sparked a nationwide series of attacks by other militias, and unless Gannon can get a confession out of someone soon, the cops or worse might be raiding them.

The tension here isn't built around our sympathy for these characters, although we do have reason to sympathize with Gannon, who has a reasonable justification for hating the police (He tells that story while playing Russian roulette with a revolver, adding another bullet with each new detail), and Noah. In fact, a good portion of the suspense comes from the fear that the group might figure out Noah's intentions, as well as Gannon's rationale for protecting his comrade. Dunham neither condemns nor condones the group's motives or goals. Instead, he lets us understand these men—as rational people pushed to the extreme, as terrifying in ways that are more realistic than political boogeymen, as much the targets of a corrupt system set against them as they are corrupt actors.

Dunham might go a little overboard in that last regard, especially since it ultimately leads to a resolution of the mystery that's more convoluted than the simple premise suggests. The final revelations of The Standoff at Sparrow Creek raise more questions than they actually answer, but thankfully, that's on a thematic level, too.

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