CHRIS' QUARANTINE RECOMMENDATION OF THE DAY (4/9/20): THE STANDOFF AT SPARROW CREEK

CHRIS' QUARANTINE RECOMMENDATION OF THE DAY (4/9/20): 

THE STANDOFF AT SPARROW CREEK

By Chris La Vigna (@Chris_LaVigna)

This film is writer/director Henry Dunham's first feature, and all I can say is... damn, way to hit the ground running man!

I don't know about you, but I'm definitely starting to feel the cabin fever getting to me. Days melt away without any face-to-face contact with friends or loved ones...it just starts to get to ya, y'know? I don't care who you are or how much of a bad-ass introverted isolation king you claim to be, this stuff messes with your head after awhile. But rather than try to escape it, today I'm going to recommend a quality thriller that forces you to confront the tension of being in a single spot for too long. Today, I'm telling you to watch THE STANDOFF AT SPARROW CREEK.

Written and directed by Henry Dunham, THE STANDOFF AT SPARROW CREEK follows Gannon (James Badge Dale), an ex-cop turned militiaman who's just minding his own business, hanging out in his trailer watching TV, when his police scanner goes off. The news he hears on it makes his blood run cold: A fallen officer's funeral was ambushed by a member of the local militia he belongs to. Multiple fatalities have been reported, and the cops are looking to get their man.

Gannon immediately books it to the warehouse/makeshift armory where him and his fellow militiamen gather. Everybody's there, suspicious of everyone else and feeling the presence of looming law enforcement hovering in the air. So now, with this group of armed, paranoid, don't-tread-on-me types all gathered together, it comes time to answer the $64,000 dollar question: which one of them did it? 

The gang's all here...

The task of smoking out the shooter falls on Gannon, who was known for being a highly skilled interrogator in his days on the force. So Gannon pulls aside each member of the group that doesn't have a rock solid alibi and starts going to work on them, finding the chinks in the armor of their psyches. With some, he goes for their pride, others their sense of indignation towards authority, and in the case of one young gun who's already got a rep for being "the quiet one you need to watch," Gannon finally breaks down his wall of silence and finds the one thing that gets him to talk, perhaps too much...

As I mentioned before, the film takes place almost entirely in one setting, and Dunham makes maximum use of every inch of this dimly-lit warehouse, treating us to anxiety-inducing wide shots of various rooms in the place, many of them only partially lit, forcing our protagonist and his brothers-in-arms to sit around in almost total darkness as he asks his questions, and forcing the audience to stare at all that negative space and wonder who could be up to what while everyone's paying attention to the one guy tied to a chair getting questions lobbed at him.

With only only smatterings of florescent light, one gets the sense that whatever subterfuge is afoot might very well sneak right under our hapless detective's nose. And those cops will be knocking on the door eventually, and some members of the crew have more reason to fear that than others...

Ford (Chris Mulkey) is just as lost as the rest of us...

Clocking in at a lean 88 minutes, Dunham is sure to never allow the rising tension to falter for a second, and as the film nears its conclusion and the fuzz closes in, we're strapped in for a truly explosive finale, followed shortly by a revelation that will have you scrambling to pick your jaw up off the floor.

The movie was released in 2018 by Cinestate, the same independent studio that produces the raw and unforgiving genre films of "outlaw auteurs" like Craig S. Zahler (whose prison survival odyssey BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 will definitely be covered here in the future), and SPARROW CREEK is undoubtedly another excellent addition to their growing catalog. 

It'll get into your head like a round of questions from Gannon, probing at your feelings of isolation, anger, and most certainly any distrust of the government recent national events have given you. Give it a watch, and remember: Trust no one. Shit, this isolation really is getting to me...

THE STANDOFF AT SPARROW CREEK is currently streaming on Hulu.