I caught up over the weekend with first time writer-director Ronald Bronstein‘s almost unbearably bleak Frownland, and still can’t seem to shake it.  Bronstein describes his ‘09 film (whose title comes from the Captain Beefheart song) as “a rotten egg lobbed with spazmo aim at the spotless surface of the silver screen,” but even that fails to do justice, I think, to its no-mercy depiction of Keith Sontag’s (actor Dore Mann) spiral downward into “burbling troll-dom.” 

And as hard as this might be to imagine, I think far more light creeps into the black-and-white world of David Lynch‘s Eraserhead than the colored, albeit grainy, one of Frownland.  In fact, compared to the almost terminally lonely Sontag, Lynch’s social misfit Henry Spencer comes off with all the charm and poise of Rex Harrison’s Henry Higgins.

No one is particularly likable, here.  In fact, the entire cast is loathsome.  But.  BUT…the performances are across-the-board astonishing.  As The New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes, “If there?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s any justice, Mann, whom Bronstein found working in a supermarket, will get an award for his transfixing performance; his clenched jaws, squinting eyes, and stifled speech avoid all stereotypes as he brings the character to life from within.” 

“Life,” to me, seems a bit of an understatement.  Imagine a bowl of churning mashed potatoes.  That’s pretty much what Mann’s face looks like throughout the entirety of Frownland‘s unshakable 107 minutes.  The trailer follows below:

 
Bonus: Richard Brody discusses Frownland

Bonus II: The French Like It, Too: Frownland in Cahiers du Cin?ɬ©ma