Brad Anderson
Vanishing On 7th Street

American Brad Anderson has been portrayed since the early steps of his career as one of the most interesting emerging filmmakers. An idea that has become even more established after "Session 9," Anderson's first significant feature film after some minor works ("The Darien Gap," "Next Stop Wonderland"). "Session 9," as well as the subsequent "The Machinist," showed us a director who is first and foremost capable, with a personal taste for thrillers. A very psychological and less commercial horror, but above all, less "thrashy," devoid of gore scenes. In this way, it is the story and its development that create discomfort, the aseptic and hallucinated atmospheres, the continuous twists. Some (rightly or wrongly) have compared him to a modern Cronenberg for his approach to filmic material, casting on him all the weight of such a comparison.

The reason it was necessary to start by mentioning Anderson's cinematic characteristics is important to understand "Vanishing on 7th Street" (2010), his latest effort. The reason is soon said: if in the previous "Session 9," "The Machinist" and "Transsiberian," Anderson had always stayed with personal stories away from the Hollywood media concentration, this latest film of his instead starts from an event that refers (at least in large part) to the catastrophic titles that increasingly dominate the world market. Indeed, the story tells of a Detroit suddenly without light for an unknown reason, where staying in the shadows means dying due to hidden presences. An overall picture that recalls the road movie, the catastrophic genre, but which is actually a thriller in full Anderson style, although the story does not seem fully in his possession as it was for past films.

Halfway between "The Happening" and "Signs," Anderson's film penetrates the screen with the usual great visual density of the director, who seems at ease in "depressed" and suffocating settings. His film stands well on the purely formal structure but loses effectiveness in entertainment: sometimes "Vanishing" moves forward by inertia, with some banal or superficial sequences, when instead more lingering would have been better. It can be said that the film flows but not as smoothly as one would have expected.

The structure remains that of a modern-styled thriller, linked to human fears: there is the similarity with Hillcoat's "The Road" regarding the evil, which comes sudden but is actually intimately linked to man, his fears, his obsessions (the shadows that "devour" are indeed abstract personifications of man himself"). Practically a humanity that is self-cannibalizing, self-destructing.

In this world, who can carry the flame of hope? Only children and animals, unaware of the affliction surrounding them, they are the light that can bring humanity back on track.