“I’m pleased to say that everyone’s come back alive from my shoots.” –Richard Stanley
Such attests to the drive, , single-minded focus, and determination that leads the visionary director. That said, the follow-up to his post-apocalyptic sci-fi nightmare, Hardware, is not a film for everyone. Though this might be argued to be applicable to the whole of the filmmaker’s catalogue, it applies doubly for Dust Devil. However, for those select few whom it is for, the film will indubitably send shockwaves through their entire being. If a horror Western, set in Africa, and shot by the love child of Andrei Tarkovsky and Alejandro Jodorowsky sounds like it might be of interest, or if the mere description itself raises curious eyebrows, then the feature might serve to prove one’s minority status in respect to another installment in a too-frequently overlooked auteur’s canon.
A nagtloper–a shape shifter (Robert John Burke) who roams the African wasteland in order to procure enough destitute souls to return to the ephemeral realm–finds Wendy (Chelsea Field), a broken individual fleeing for the coast in hopes of clarifying her thoughts after having recently separated from her husband, Mark (Rufus Swart). Unbeknownst to her, the local police chief of Bethany, Ben Mukurob (Zakes Mokae), is attempting to apprehend the party responsible for a recent series of slayings.
Dust Devil is based on the legend of the South African serial killer referred to as “Nhadiep.” As much a tale of a transient malevolence as a metaphysical exposé upon personal and cultural decimation, Dust Devil is rife, both visually as well as narratively, with ideas. Aside from its consistent, yet never intrusive, religious iconography–thus lending more weight to the battle between good and evil (duly complimented by aligning the villain with fire before our heroine arises from a watery bath)–the feature wears much like the sage-like utterance of a learn’d oracle.
Stanley brings us to his homeland, a land which seems to have weathered the whole of time, as the desert intuitively speaks for its inhabitants in its indifferent hollowness. The patient picture, on par with the pace of a Andrei Tarkovsky feature, saturates us in its existential loneliness as the director refuses to appease his audience as he adamantly protects the integrity of his story. For example, instead of positing the ever-popular rendition of cultish goth Satanism, he roots his ominous worship in Voodoo-esque shamanism, thereby ushering and promoting a greater sense of foreboding via historic weight to the proceedings.
Stanley’s ever-present and astute sagacity in respect to an articulate visual palette is second only to the craft of the film as layer upon layer of meaning is subtly conveyed. For instance, the filmmaker intersperses a scene in which two characters–potential allies to our antagonist–breeches a vaginal chasm between a set of boulders with a sex sequence involving the titular demon and Wendy. Implications are subsequently left to the viewer.
The surreal lens which Stanley shoots his film echoes the best moments of Alejandro Jodorowsky (Dust Devil’s composer, Simon Boswell, also scored the Chilean director’s Santa Sangre) as repeated snippets of owls, a fly drinking blood, hieroglyphs, and photo negatives imprint themselves upon the viewer’s mind. It is with this that the philosophical import is established as the voiceover tells us that life is a mere fleeting projection, a moment trapped in time. Such ruminations upon being are succinctly interrupted by the film tearing and ripping off screen, thus insinuating that what the viewer is witnessing is not a film titled Dust Devil, but rather, life itself. Not surprisingly, after we are greeted with a manmade rock formation in the shape of a spiral, the dual plots inevitably intertwine by film’s end as they conclude on a very nice note of irony. The latter takes the audience by surprise due to the fact that, having been hypnotized over the course of a little over an hour-and-a-half, we have all but forgotten the precepts upon which the plot is based.
Postponed due to being caught in Kafka-esque post-production and distribution hell, Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil has thankfully been permitted to see the light of day. The work is onto itself while sharing the literal velocity of a Henry James novel on Benzedrine, atmosphere of a picture by Sergio Leone in a drought, philosophic import and weight of Francis Ford Coppola in a meditative mood, and visual and symbolic flare of Luis Buñuel . . . well . . . as Luis Buñuel. But be forewarned, audience members who do not harbor an appreciation for all of the aforementioned may well find themselves disappointed. Regardless, what we have before us, like it or not, is irrefutably unlike anything that has come before or since and can only be labeled a signature Richard Stanley picture.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
