SHIMMER LAKE: A Typical Mystery Made New Through Its Reversal

Shimmer Lake, Oren Uziel‘s darkly comedic crime thriller, follows local Sheriff Zeke Sikes (Benjamin Walker) as he investigates a bank robbery. His brother, Andy Sikes (Rainn Wilson) is involved in the robbery along with frequent criminal Ed Burton (Wyatt Russell) and meth-head Chris Morrow (Mark Rendall). The film tells its story in reverse order over the course of a week. Each day is given a section heading and opens with a character waking up at the beginning of the new day.

The film begins with atmospheric establishing shots of the town and its titular lake. This works well to set the tone of the film, to firmly set the audience in the weird and slightly comedic worlds found in the small town mystery. The beautiful, yet haunting score from Joseph Trapanese also helps to establish this tone of mystery, suspense, and small town weirdness.

The Narrative Framework Helps the Mystery

The film falls frequently into common thriller tropes, but never feels stagnant and too familiar. This is all because the way it is told in reverse helps reveal the more common story elements in a more entertaining and unique way. By telling the film in reverse, the audience is able to draw their own conclusions about how the characters ended up where they are before going back and having the plot filled in with somewhat contrived and formulaic answers to our questions.

Uziel does a nice job of setting up jokes which we don’t see the payoff for until further sections. At times, it feels like we hear the punchline before the joke, which is an interesting storytelling technique. One moment which I thought was well done involved a character blatantly saying what actually happened, but we had no way of knowing its truth since we were not privy to the prior knowledge of this plot point.

This might not be a moment of comedy for all, but I laughed knowing the character had told Rob Corddry and Ron Livingston‘s FBI agent characters investigating the case exactly what happened with them casually laughing it off as a joke, which was exactly the character’s intention.

By the end of the film, we are given answers to all our questions, answers that would feel basic and stereotypical, but in Shimmer Lake they feel like an interesting progression, adding together all the information we gathered from the trip the film takes backwards in time. If this film was told in chronological order, the mystery would be nonexistent, or would end in a very cliché flashback to a point-of-view we did not see originally. I think going the reversal route helped Shimmer Lake push past the tropes the film uses to carry its story.

Comedic Actors in a More Serious Environment

I personally love seeing actors I am familiar with from comedy be given more serious roles. At times, it works to show the strengths of these actors who are commonly written off. In some cases, it works in Shimmer Lake, but in others, the actor feels out of place or only seems to be given comedic moments to work with.

Rainn Wilson stands out in his role of a man over his head and uncertain in the criminal world. He works well at showing how nervous and uncomfortable the character gets throughout the film. At the end of the week, he seems almost pushed over the edge, nervous at what might happen to him because of his involvement in this robbery.

When we finally see him on the first day the story takes place, he seems much more an average husband, showing the beginning signs of nerves when he makes it known to his wife and daughter he won’t be able to attend her recital that night. At this point, his uneasy feeling comes only from knowing he will be involved with this heist for one night. As the film progressed until this point, we saw his demeanor become more and more stressed as he realizes the intensity of what he has gotten himself into.

Adam Pally‘s character Reed feels more like a typical comedic relief role. He is not given as much to work with other than simple jokes, some of which work better than others. His character is part of a long form joke stretching the entire run time of the film. It’s interesting to see the progression of simple annoyance to anger occur backwards, but the joke loses some of its steam by lasting the entire length of the film.

Seeing as this is one of the only major elements of the film given to Adam Pally, his character feels like he is almost only in the film for this one joke. As a fan of his work in other comedy films and television, I was hoping his performance would be stronger in this film.

John Michael Higgins is given a moment of tense emotion, but it is undercut by the background jokes of someone with diarrhea just off screen, but clearly heard over the top of the scene. This is one scene which felt much too broad of comedy for the tone Shimmer Lake was trying to achieve. When the comedy was subtle, and slightly strange, the tone felt true, something similar to the moments of comedy found in Fargo and Twin Peaks.

Conclusion

Shimmer Lake takes a simplistic story and breathes new life through the use of reverse storytelling, a beautiful muted color scheme, and strong performances from its cast of primarily comedians. At times, the comedy feels too broad for the serious tone of the film, but overall, it is an enjoyable entry in the crime thriller genre.

What did you think of Shimmer Lake? 

Shimmer Lake is now on Netflix.