CR: Offscreen

Offscreen is the third feature film from award-winning Denmark-native filmmaker Christoffer Boe (Reconstruction, Allegro) that screened as part of the New Frontier program last week at Sundance. It stars Nicholas Bro, an stage and screen actor, as himself. As his relationship with his girlfriend Lene dissolves, Bro borrows a camera from director Boe with the intention of filming a love story starring Lene and himself as their loves grows together again. What he ends up capturing on camera is his own mental and emotional breakdown as Lene flees to Berlin, and he develops a serious psychological dependency on the camera and falls into a downward spiral of obsession, alienation, and self-destruction.

The audience immediately knows something bad has happened as the film opens. In a shot reminiscent of Gasper Noe’s Irreversible, Bro keeps the camera aimed at his face as he moves through a crowded bar, the patrons moving out of his way, looking at him in horror. He’s shirtless, deranged looking, and red (blood, or is it just the lighting?). It’s night, the video image is gritty and dark, unclear, giving us just enough to suggest menace and mayhem. He steps outside, spins around rapidly, the background blurring behind him, and then the sickening thud of something hard striking flesh and bone and then the camera is lying in the street. Director Boe addresses the camera, stating his opinion that Bro wanted the film made, “Or he would have turned off the camera.” Newspaper clippings inform us that Bro has been missing, that there are rumors of him making his own film. This is the first minute or two of the film, brilliantly composed to grab the audience’s attention and curiosity – whether you like Bro, like the grungy shot-on-video look of it all, love or hate any of it, you’ll want to know what happened. You’ll want to know who Bro was, and how he got to the first shot of the film. I won’t spoil any more of this for you.

Watch 15 films in a matter of days, spend several hours a day standing in line outside theaters, and another few hours in front of a computer screen sandwiched between a dozen other people with laptops trying to be creative while writing your third film review of the day and battling with touch-and-go internet access, and you’re going to be harder to impress. I know I was. And I love movies. I saw this film at just about the 1-week mark at Sundance, burnout point when even really interesting films were starting to seem too long. Offsceen was a serious fucking wake-up call, maybe because it doesn’t feel like a movie – it’s more subtle than something like Man Bites Dog, and for that reason a hundred times more realistic, and it successfully weds the filmmaking technique to the story, unlike the equally grainy Dogme Films. Nicholas Bro’s tour-de-force performance is better than any other I saw at Sundance. An established stage actor and supporting man in Denmark, this will surely launch him to leading role status. Bro gives everything he has to the camera, and it pays off. Emotion is a two-way street between himself and the audience – you sympathize with him, you’re afraid for him, and ultimately, you’re terrified of him.