A Crime Across Four Landscapes
2025 · 7m · United States
Directed by Aidan Weaver
Genres: crime, experimental, mystery
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tense
When a small-town crime goes awry, the evidence is scattered across four picturesque Southern landscapes — and the viewer must piece together what happened.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A mystery that asks you to *construct* narrative from landscape—okay, that's genuinely weird—but it never quite commits to the surrealism enough to justify ditching plot altogether; feels caught between the experimental film it wants to be and the puzzle-box it actually is.
Weaver's spatial montage recalls the classical tradition of cinema as evidence-gathering, from Antonioni through contemporary essayistic work; the restraint in not showing the crime directly, letting Southern landscape become a kind of formal character, positions this squarely in the lineage of mystery as visual argument.
The decision to let geography—not dialogue or exposition—carry narrative weight hinges entirely on how precisely each landscape frame communicates. If those four locations are composed to whisper different pieces of the story, it's elegant; if they're just pretty, the whole thing collapses.
Reviews
Presented as though we're observing events through the window of a passing car, the film becomes a twisted game of spot-the-difference, repeatedly returning to familiar locations and asking us to notice what's changed. The crime story at its centre could easily have felt familiar, but its fragmented structure and demanding form make it feel refreshingly original instead.