In the thriller genre, there are two radically different approaches to setting. One is to the eschew specificity completely and just have the characters shoot, car-chase and have sex with each other in a bland non-place, such as in the film Baby Driver. The other method is to emphasize specificity, thereby rendering the setting as part of the film, something having as much say in the plot as many of the characters, such as in No Country for Old Men. Rather than deploy either of these approaches, Back Roads struggles to establish the storyline into time and space, and in the process, it fumbles away most of its thrills.
Back Roads follows Harley Altmyer, played by Alex Pettyfer, who also directs the film (his debut in that role). Harley is the oldest of four children in a family ripped apart by the mother’s murder of the father; instead of leaving home for college or career, Harley—who is presumably around 20 years of age—has stayed with his three younger sisters in the role of surrogate parent. He muddles through a rigorous daily routine that involves working multiple jobs, scraping by on just enough money and balancing the volatile personalities of his younger siblings. He also attends a publicly funded weekly therapy session to discuss his predicament. As the story untwists, Harley is involved in multiple romantic entanglements, two murders and several layers of parental abuse.
The film never really fires. It is rarely engaging, let alone exciting, and the main culprit is the failed approach to setting. Back Roads repeatedly tells the viewer that Harley lives in rural Pennsylvania—hence the title—but this setting never becomes a meaningful part of the film. Harley has a scoped rifle, drives a pickup and is often shown walking on his gravel driveway, but those are not signifiers of a specific setting; they are the generic trappings of a lazy suggestion of a general rural setting. Beyond his Pennsylvania license plate, Harley could be living anywhere. The film is also supposed to be set in the mid-‘90s, but again, minus the fact that no one has a cell phone or home computer, nothing in the film screams this period.
Now, the lack of a specific setting is not the death knell for a film. But in the case of Back Roads, it is indicative of the film’s half-baked composition overall. For instance, the characters are not really developed—not even Harley, who appears in nearly every scene—yet the plot unwinds in a way to suggest that the viewer knows much more about the characters than the film actually reveals. Some of the blame falls on the acting; Pettyfer, for instance, tries to suggest a depth and weirdness to Harley by impersonating Jake Gyllenhaal in the latter actor’s last half-dozen roles, but he never pulls it off. The film also lazily hopes to get by on shorthand and stereotype, in one instance expecting the audience to see a hunting rifle, a pickup truck and girls calling their brother a “faggot” for reading an “art book” and then to automatically fill in the character and setting details of a backward, isolated community of stubborn, ignorant people. This stereotyping gets even more offensive once most of the big plot reveals are completed. Back Roads almost comes across like an offering from the Fantastic Beasts franchise, where the filmmakers take for granted that the audience is well-informed in the story lore and will eagerly (and accurately) fill in the details of things the films themselves only barely gesture at.
Screenwriter Tawni O’Dell—who also wrote the novel of the same title—delivers the framework for a wonderful thriller about family and trauma, something as intrinsic to US-American literature as Faulkner, here, but Back Roads does not do enough to bring that story to life on the screen. It feels more like a companion piece to the novel than a standalone work in its own right.
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