Exit 9
2018 · 10m · USA
Directed by Joseph Barglowski
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Maddy is abandoned at Exit 9 off the highway after being stood up by Mike. She arrives at his workplace, a shabby indoor golf facility called The Only Game in Town, only to find him absent, and embarks on foot through parking lots and strip malls to locate him.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
16mm, an indoor golf facility called The Only Game in Town, and a girl walking through strip malls to confront a no-show boyfriend. That's a setting nobody fakes.
16mm in indoor golf and strip-mall purgatory — Barglowski's ambling low-key mystery is the kind of patient regional drift I'm always grateful for. Reichardt-adjacent without imitating.
16mm in strip-mall purgatory and indoor golf facilities is a specific kind of American melancholy, and the stood-up-at-Exit-9 frame gives it a mystery's drift. Conservative bet on the page summary alone, but the texture's promising.
Reviews
Perfectly captures its small town American setting and atmospheres... the feeling of being in your 20's, that untethered age where you may be lost and confused but you're free to roam.