Katie Aselton, best known for her acting roles in The League and anything written/directed by Mark Duplass, is back with her second feature film — her first being The Freebie — and while I see the consistency I also see her failings to meet her new goals.
With The Freebie it’s easy to see someone trying their hands at something new by using a simple enough template in order to create success. Aselton looks to create a fluid free form relationship comedy/drama which centers around the effect of this one moment in the couples relationship when they insert the idea of a night of debauchery with no consequences. With Black Rock it’s Aselton taking a crack at Deliverance style storytelling, but for girls. Just like with The Freebie she focuses the film on one moment and how that one moment changes the dynamics of everyone’s relationship at that point in time. After that it’s no longer about anything other than survival and trying to figure out when and how violence is acceptable. The problem with that is that the film suffers a lot from general production values.
When the film begins we see Abby (Kate Aselton) appear at the docks waiting on Sarah (Kate Bosworth) only to be surprised by the attendance of Lou (Lake Bell) for this girls only expedition to an isolated island for a weekend of whatever girls do when they go camping. When did girls spend their free time going camping? I almost want to quote After the Wedding and make a crack about it being how they go gay… but that might be too much.
In these initial scenes Aselton puts together all the bits and pieces of this friend-triangle (can I trademark that phrase?) of Sarah, Abby and Lou which makes you care. Shortly after all of this we see the insertion of the male-triangle wandering around the island; Henry (Will Bouvier), Derek (Jay Paulson) and Alex (Anslem Richardson) and this is where the film falls dead on it’s back. With Aselton and Mark Duplass credited as the writers of the film it’s not surprising that it’s in these non free form pseudo polite dialogue scenes where almost every character comes off as poor. It might be aided by the fact that Jay Paulson ends up playing one of the most ham fisted characters of the film and amps it up to about 15 towards the end in a way that just hurts everything.
The film wants to be this tale of survival and feminine power, but just ends up being a lethargic exercise in being mediocre to down right boring. The film only runs 80 minutes long but feels like a lifetime once it’s passed the first twenty. It even feels like it’s getting gritty at one point and once again becomes an intimate relationship between the female character, now under a completely different context, but soon enough it just switches back to the low budget horror survival mode with a touch of overacting from the guys and it ruins it.