“RALLING“Opens with a long, ominous one-shot where the familiar experience of returning home takes on a strange, unpleasant shade. Ryan (Ryan Wuestewald) arrives at the family’s Oahu goods, after an unspecified time away. When the camera tracks behind him and he walks the ground in the yard, he meets a parade of family friends who greet him warmly and who he looks at almost as if they are foreigners. Even his siblings, Meg (Nikki Deparis) and John (Hans Christopher), are treated with the first doubt before they (re) introduce themselves. When a silent panic becomes evident in the eyes of Ryan, the happy return begins to feel like a nightmare.
Executive produced by Werner Herzogwhose influence Can be felt in filmMix of Improv and script scenes, “Rolling” often pauses the story to observe the young, attractive party on the festive Luau Meg throw for her birthday, when playing volleyball, fry a pig and lounge on the beach. And although these silent moments that inflate the film’s barely 70-minute driving time, there is a nagging scent of ruin in the air, the feeling that Ryan’s time in his home will be crucial and tragic. In her best, Yana Alliat’s sharp function finds a balance between both calm and stress, which effectively places the audience in the idea of its confused audience surrogate.
The circumstances of Ryan’s situation are consciously and carefully explained from the interactions he has with the other guests and how they talk about him behind his back. One scar that runs up on the head is the early clue to an accident from five years ago, one that left him with brain damage, memory loss, motor skills and an inability to regulate his feelings. We do not get much indication of who Ryan was before this happened to him and forced him into the care of his mother (away in California for a holiday while Ryan was educated on his siblings) but the information we get – as his ability to remember a line or two from “Hamlet” – points to some intelligent and outgoing, now to feel like a shell of his earlier.
The script, from Alliata and Amy Miner, conveys Ryan’s status as an outsider to this once familiar world. While most of the guests are polite to Ryan, they also clearly avoid him: at a tender moment, he talks to a salamander on the ground and asks if it will be his friend when no one else will. Meg is seemingly supportive but treats Ryan with infantilizing children’s gloves and excludes him subtly and forces him to stay in a remote guest house away from the rest of the party. Older brother John is more open antagonistic, beating and degrading Ryan when he cannot perform basic chores, but John also clearly carries a debt and himself disgust that makes him knock out. All three actors are strong and credible as siblings with a charred and difficult family past and find natural grace of grace even when their actions are on the abominable. Wuestewald especially affects Ryan, and depicts his confusion and almost foggy brain views of the world.
Apart from the three main actors, the majority of the film largely contains non -professional actors, thrown away from Allia’s real friends and family from her childhood in Hawaii. Their presence is a seamless background for the main characters, and in careful silent moments where the film stops to watch the party guests swimming on the beach or playing volleyball, a real sense of time and place is conveyed (the fact that almost everyone on this “traditional” Luau is White goes largely from, even when Siblings’ Uncle is played by Michal, gamed by Michal, gamed by Michal, giving one of the siblings. Alliates camera, rich with golden and blue shades (Rafael Leyva served as head of photography) is often particularly fixed on the male guests, a parade of buff, shirt -free men whose masculinity feels clearly contrasted with Ryan’s fragility and shows the adult world he has been locked out.
Lurches in the background of “Reeling” is the mystery of what happened to Ryan, and as the sun goes down, the conflict boils over when his stranger and indignation further emerge. Alliata is skilled at using their filmmaking to place the audience in Ryan’s head, often with long tracking images to build up stress while using Michael Macallister’s plodding, percussion. A prominent stage -sounded to Acapella song with the sound that is otherwise muted captures the hazy, fuzzy feeling of drunk euphoria before the sound kicks back, and Ryan hits another low. Not all technical gambit -function – several switches in image conditions in the third act feel more distracting than revealing – but “back” succeeds in their goal to deepen the audience in Ryan’s point of view all the time.
As the film moves from painting a portrait of a moment in these people’s lives to answer the questions it raises, “rolling” begins to feel more generic, because family drama proves to be quite predictable and well trampled. The conclusion to Ryan and John’s conflict proves more than a little pat, and the end of the film is ambiguous in a way that feels unfinished. But in its entirety, “rolling” and its stomach -cure birthday from hell do for an effective clock and an experience that is difficult to forget.
Rating: B.
“Reeling” premiered at 2025 South by Southwest Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
