A taut two-hander, The Aviary (2022) zooms in on two women’s attempted escape from a remote cult compound. While the film doesn’t reinvent the genre, it does execute its tropes with style and commitment.
Synopsis
Jillian (Malin Akerman) and Blair (Lorenza Izzo) are on the run. They are attempting a daring escape from The Aviary, a mysterious cult tucked away in the remote New Mexico desert. After living under leader Seth’s (Chris Messina) brainwashing and abusive ways, the two women plunge into the brutal sands. With little more than a few energy bars and limited water, Jillian and Blair chart their path. Their plan is a multi-day trek to nearby Gallup, the only major city or town anywhere near The Aviary.
The desert would be enough of a challenge, but soon after starting Jillian and Blair both experience increasingly concerning hallucinations. Wrong turns and paranoia plague the women, both growing desperate and terrified with each passing, sun-baked, hour. The two may have fled The Aviary, but will they survive long enough to start their new lives?
A Wicked Landscape
Extreme geographic areas like the New Mexico desert offer filmmakers a chance to lean into their alien nature. Michael Pearce achieved this recently with Encounter (2021), and co-directors Chris Cullari and Jennifer Raite turn a similar trick in The Aviary. Alternating between the punishing heat and withering brightness of day, and the inky void of the desert night, every vista and nook offers little but torment for Jillian and Blair.
Of course, this is no new trick. John Ford was famous for deploying the Monument Valley landscape to impose on his characters. Generations of science fiction and horror filmmakers have leaned on the approach as well. Deserts are daunting, and it takes hardly a handful of aesthetic tweaks to achieve an aesthetic that brings them in line with what we imagine of a distant, brutal, planet.
Cullari and Raite inject just enough flair to make some of the approaches feel, if not new, renovated. A spattering of tracking drone shots imbues the sense of an ever-watching perspective. It echoes the women’s fear of Seth’s possible pursuit. Cullari and Raite augment this with a dampened palette of grays, blacks, and grainy browns. There is no mystical essence to this desert. It is but a deadly impediment to Jillian and Blair’s quest. Not an ounce of comfort to be gleaned.
The choice is effective, if somewhat drab the longer we repeatedly see the same corners of the world. So is the promise and the challenge of a film that traps its characters in one savage locale. Cullari and Raite are talented, but they fall just short of the propulsive and chameleonic aesthetic of a comparable title like Arctic (2019).
Surreal Flourishes
Some of the most memorable sequences from the film arrive courtesy of Jillian and Blair’s burgeoning separation from reality. Sam first appears in dreams. Flashes in Jillian’s head as she fights off the effects of his mysterious “Synthesis” program. These moments are accompanied by pulsating and brightly-colored lights, splashing rainbow over the darkened landscape.
Once Blair starts experiencing similar breaks, Sam and other figures weave into the daytime. No flashing lights or unreality here. Simply two women’s minds deteriorating from the stress of their circumstances and the battle against The Aviary’s programming. All of the choices Cullari and Raite make in this vein work wonderfully. Even though the surreal elements are well-represented by the end of the runtime, their success suggests an alternative and more successful film that fully embraced the phantasmagorical.
Akerman and Izzo
A two-hander in the desert is a tall order for a pair of performers, but Akerman and Izzo tackle it gamely. There’s a great deal of history baked into their dynamic that we gradually uncover. Izzo’s Blair is a trust fund kid that Akerman’s Jillian convinced to join The Aviary. Much of that came through a relationship Blair struck up with Sam before knowing the extent of his actions. That push and pull between past and potential future saturate the journey with subtext.
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