As a critic, and as someone who deeply appreciates that not every film can pack a $100 million budget, criticising a film for budgetary reasons feels kind of unappreciative. Every filmmaker has to start somewhere, after all. Be it with a handheld camera in their own home, like Oren Peli did with Paranormal Activity, or with a small cast on a minute budget ala Christopher Nolan‘s Following, every film maker has a beginning. When it comes to small scale directors producing small scale films, it’s kind and it’s important to be a bit more lenient in our criticisms.
Unfortunately, Nils Taylor‘s Quarries pushes this lenience well beyond its boundaries. This is a film of such ineptitude that watching it feels like a chore even before the film’s title card displays just minutes in, so heavily plagued by technical mishaps and narrative fumbles that audibly laughing at it feels inevitable. Writing these words to describe a young film maker’s efforts to find their path verges on tearing me up inside.
The Good Guys Aren’t Very Good
After an opening sequence that feels like a short film a lacklustre student would make as their first piece at College, Quarries introduces us to its protagonist, Kat (Nicole Marie Johnson). It doesn’t bombard us with exposition while it sets up her back story in her first scene, it allows us to figure out her relationship with the man dropping her off at the wilderness expedition. We soon identify him as her brother, and when he asks her “Is he gone for good?” our eyes slowly pan down to the recent cut on Kat’s lip, and immediately her recent history and motives for this team expedition are laid out.
The issue is that this is also where her motives and history end. Abuse victims can lead to powerful character arcs in cinema, but when “abuse victim” is the only trait you can pin to a film’s protagonist, it doesn’t work. Abuse victims are more than their abuse, by ignoring every other part of their identity they become a plot device and a cliche rather than a person.
The cliches don’t end there either. We’re soon introduced to the rest of the expedition and, Bingo cards at the ready chaps, there’s: a bickering couple who, deep down, do love each other; a bossy leader who does reveal a soft heart underneath her exterior; even a rude and obnoxious youngster that, surprise, turns out to also be a drug addict. Quarries tries to find interesting characters, but it can only source cliches.
Eventually it starts to move its story along. Kat and five other women, who are so inconsequential and poorly written that writing them out name by name here feels pointless, venture off into the wilderness to “discover themselves”. Eventually, they are attacked by a group of men for no real reason, causing them to separate. The group must come together, despite barely knowing each other, and fend off their attackers to save their lives and learn the true meaning of strength within oneself.
The Bad Guys Are…Even Worse
Poor characters aren’t the end of the world though – it’s possible to enjoy a film even if the characters don’t really work, we just need a good story and a decent production and we’ll be okay. Unfortunately, Quarries is lacking in that department too. Immediately, too much time is spent with the bad guys and it throws the film’s narrative off balance – it doesn’t know how to play this. It unintentionally turns them into secondary characters rather than faceless villains, but it also refuses to ever explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. That simply doesn’t work.
With this kind of story and these kinds of characters, you have two choices. You can leave your villains without identity and let them attack with no motive like a feral animal, or you can turn them into real people and give them opinions and motives, creating a moral battle. Quarries ultimately sits on the fence here, meaning our villains are important enough to the film to justify a handful of scenes to themselves, but not important enough to be given personality or reasoning.
Technical Issues By The Bucket Load
Quarries repeatedly falls victim to its low budget. You can make incredible films with the most minuscule amounts of money, just look at the two films mentioned at the start of this review – they both turn a small budget into their biggest asset. Quarries, on the other hand, is plagued by it. Blood splatters almost always look exaggerated and fake, the lighting is repeatedly mismatched between shots, the colour balancing even takes multiple different forms all within the same scene.
Ultimately, the film never convinces you that you’re in safe hands, and it’s impossible to feel invested in anything that happens because of this. It isn’t only the budget that causes these issues, it’s also the direction. Characters running long distances in slow motion is a disaster waiting to happen, and something Quarries indulges in frequently. The action editing is also sloppy, cutting so frequently during some scenes that the moment becomes impossible to follow. One character’s death is even revealed through a still image disguised as a moving shot, and it’s monumentally off-putting.
Conclusion
I’d like to say that Quarries falls into the category of failing to live up to its potential, but it’s tough to find any glimmers of hope throughout the film’s lean 80 minutes. The characters are thinly sketched to the point of insult, there’s little demonstration of even the most basic storytelling elements and technical mishaps crop up with such regularity that it’s tough to ever take the film seriously. At one point in the film, a character asks “Why is this happening?” and, frankly, I’d like to know the same thing.
Quarries has such a poor understanding of basic film making that it’s impossible not to question how it got made in the first place.
So, what do you think? Can a film’s budget be its undoing, or should all films on this scale be discussed with more lenience? Let us know in the comments!
Quarries was released in the U.S. on the 10th March 2017 and can be found online under various streaming services.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZc87CS2E_k
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