Director: John R. Hand
MPAA Rating: NR
Film Pulse Score: 3.5/10
John R. Hand’s The Synthetic Man is a crude nightmare of a film that asks the question “What would it be like to live inside the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic attempting to write a science fiction novel?” While you may not feel closer to that answer after the film’s 73-minute runtime concludes, you will no doubt feel confused and slightly dirty.
The film stars April Hand as Iris, a wide-eyed young woman attempting to craft the next great American novel. When I say wide-eyed, I mean her eyes are deliberately opened wide for the duration of the film. This is no doubt designed to show she’s suffering from some sort of mental illness, however most of the time this comes of as just feeling goofy.
As Iris begins to formulate her story, involving a synthetic man sent to earth by aliens in order to control the human race, she begins to lose her grip on reality, and slowly descends into her own fantasy world.
The opening scene involves a mysterious set of black-gloved hands creepily rubbing on Iris’s face as she sleeps. The hands then produce a scalpel, which then gets rubbed on the face some more before being plunged into her eye. This was a great way to start the film, however the momentum slowed to a crawl at this point.
We see Iris floating through life, wandering around depressing parking lots, strip malls, and video stores, with periodic shifts into the fantasy world she is crafting. Things get more and more surreal and it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what’s happening in reality and what Iris is manifesting in her mind.
This is an ambitious concept, however the film quickly falls victim to the low-budget art-house indie tropes we see all too often. The camerawork combines a mix of digital and VHS, however the digital quality is so poor, it’s often hard to tell the difference in formats. It seemed that the director was looking for a clear distinction between the degraded VHS look and the cleaner, modern look, however to the untrained eye it just all looks bad.
Typical with many ultra-low budget indies, the acting, sound, lighting, and special effects were also very rough. Most of this was certainly due to budgetary constraints, so I hesitate to fault the filmmakers too much, however with digital photography being so inexpensive and many new ways to raise funding for a film, it’s becoming more difficult to blame things like equipment when a movie looks bad.
Negatives aside, as I stated previously, this is an ambitious film. It goes to some very dark, weird places near the climax, which prove to be absurd and slightly shocking. I also quite enjoyed the score and the opening and closing titles. The marketing materials for this film in general are great and done in a similar style to Beyond the Black Rainbow.
The Synthetic Man is still a tough film to recommend however. Mainstream audiences will recoil at the quality and strangeness of it, and fans of surrealistic art films like The Oregonian or anything done by Lynch will find that it drags too long before going really out there. In the end, I think it’s an interesting concept mired by a weak second act and sub par acting and cinematography.
The Synthetic Man – Trailer from john Hand on Vimeo.
