A SINGLE SHOT Review

• Save

Director David M Rosenthal has switched gears and made a sharp turn into some dark, dark territory. The director of such films as the comedies See This Movie and Falling Up, along with the musical drama Janie Jones, Rosenthal has decided on a film adaptation of the Matthew F. Jones novel of the same name. Even though the style and atmosphere is completely different than anything Rosenthal has produced in the past, he appears to be perfectly-suited for the backwoods-crime-thriller; he seems out of place, but hardly out of his depth.

A Single Shot revolves around an isolated and desperate, equally haggard, man by the name of John Moon (Sam Rockwell) who has lost, just about, everything in his life – the family farm, his wife and child, any form of gainful employment…a razor. Moon is able to keep himself afloat, nutrition-wise, through his excellent hunting skills which he employs regularly to poach deer in the nearby woods. During an early morning hunting trip (which opens the film) Moon fires upon a deer, follows the blood trail and happens upon a young woman with a gunshot wound to the chest, courtesy of Moon himself.

Before storing the body away in an abandoned truck trailer, Moon stumbles across the young woman’s makeshift camp and with it, a box containing a large amount of cash, which he obviously takes with him. As if Moon does not have enough on his plate already with stalling his wife’s request for divorce and trying to win her back at the same time, he has to fend off the various criminal types that want their money back, plus revenge for the death of the young woman.

All of this is, of course, familiar territory as I said before; the desperate man thrust into a difficult situation after stumbling across a heap of ill-gotten gains. The cat and mouse game that inevitably follows and composes the bulk of the story. You’ve seen it before, but Rosenthal poses the question “But…have you seen it with Sam Rockwell?”

Rockwell gives his usual, strong performance as the desperate and exhausted John Moon (what we call Default-Rockwell) tasked with trying earnestly to keep everything together; supporting Rockwell are an abundance of equally-solid performances from the likes of William H. Macy as the worst-dressed lawyer in town; Joe Anderson as the scummy, tattooed ex-con; Ted Levine as Moon’s only chance at gainful employment; Jeffrey Wright as (wait…that’s Jeffrey Wright) Moon’s, and Alcohol’s, best friend.

All of these substantial performances are paired perfectly and enhanced through the film’s ominous tone which is quickly established by cinematographer Eduard Grau‘s breath-taking showcase of the dreary, fog-infested mountainous terrain with its own inherent sense of foreboding. A Single Shot doesn’t stop there with its bleak tone (complete with Rockwell carving up a deer corpse, slit-throats and detached digits, and copious amounts of tobacco spit) topping it off with a menacingly exacting score from Atli Örvarsson, which does (at times) grow irritating with its overbearing violins and their death-screeches.

I must point out that I have not read the source material for Rosenthal’s film adaptation, but I’d venture a guess that the director and his crew successfully captured the bleak, almost nihilistic, tone of the novel; Rosenthal appears to be right at home in the tension-filled, backwoods setting of desperation and isolation. A Single Shot may seem awfully familiar to a lot of viewers, but it is, however, elevated from the levels of the mundane through the performances of Rockwell and Co., Grau’s presentation of the film’s forlorn setting to the never-ending bleakest that is the film’s ending.