Alex Turner’s second short film, Disposal, is a scathing critique and black humor examination upon contemporary ethics. In truly Hitchcockian fashion, the director scrutinizes, no one, but two pairs of juxtaposed individuals and, as a consequence, the film’s tagline “Love is not disposable. But a body is” wryly surmises the mindset and tone of Turner’s findings. What is left is pure cinematic enjoyment par excellence.
When the paths of yuppie couple Ted (Sam Wright) and Sandra (Catherine Burns) and a father-and-son hunting duo (played by J.K. Simmons and Jake Smith respectively) collide by dire, but nonetheless ironic, coincidence, both pair wishes that they hadn’t.
After his short film debut, Chuck, a serial killer suspense thriller of intimidating proportions, Turner took his acute celluloid sensibilities and continued to hone them. Fortunately, much like his cinematic forerunner, Alfred Hitchcock, Turner returns to the thriller genre with Disposal and, also like the Master of Suspense, the young director amazingly succeeds in keeping things fresh, unlike many lesser filmmakers who, as they return time and again to the same genre, continue to fetidly stagnate.
Of course, this says nothing of the fact that, with only one short work under his belt, this very up-and-coming director garnered enough attention to be granted a budget that would allot for some very reputable faces. Yet, solid screenwriting and directorial acumen doesn’t hurt either. Not surprisingly, not only did Turner not disappoint, but he moved foreword in his filmmaking.
Turner’s inquiry into modern-day ethics is as ironic as it is thorough. Disposal opens with a yuppie couple who, having accidentally run over a homeless man (Marvin Schwartz) in their freshly waxed SUV, find themselves at odds with morality in that Ted, who is not so much concerned that someone is no longer living (he refers to the individual, ever so lovingly, as a “speed bump,” both in the literal and metaphorical sense) as a result of his vile temper, becomes instantly preoccupied at the thought of getting caught in that all of the time he has invested in climbing the corporate ladder would thereby have been in vain. Likewise, his wife, Sandra, whose various neurosis are due, no doubt, to worrying about not having anything substantial to worry about, frets of what a manslaughter charge might do to her fledging acting career.
After Ted decides for both of them that disposing of the body would be in everyone’s best interest (we suppose he is also speaking for the homeless man as well), their moral dilemma is gradually (if not begrudgingly) confronted, yet to a very disconcerting degree (Turner shows, in one solitary scene, an unnerving reaction by the couple which satirizes yuppie culture on a level comparable to the whole of Mary Harron’s American Psycho).
However, as cunningly as Turner–perhaps a tad heavy-handedly but, given the time frame, very forgivably–issues a pitch black predicament involving two hunters, a father and son, the former played superbly by J.K. Simmons. Not only is a very feasible reversal of fortunes presented, but a double entendre atop both a literal and visual irony is given as the shot-in-the dark, jaw-on-floor finale quickly follows.
Little else can be said of Alex Turner’s Disposal without running the risk of weakening the potential impact of an initial viewing which, by all means, should be mandatory, not only for beginning filmmakers (may their futile sobs be few), but to anyone interested–not only in the horror or thriller genre–but the whole of cinema. By the closing frame, the awe and wonder of how the director managed to procure such big names in a sophomore short film will become a moot concern as the steadfast screenwriting and daunting direction precedes itself, which is second only to the discomfort promoted by the tautological, viscerally nature of what Turner has refuted to ignore: human nature in its rawest and wholly unapologetic form. It is not that the young filmmaker so much as holds the mirror up to us so much as he makes sure to polish it so that we cannot have any alibis or excuses for what is staring us in the face.
Did I mention that all of this is accomplished in less than twenty minutes?
-Egregious Gurnow
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