Sunset Edge Take 2

This is a do over.  I don't do do overs but I'm doing one here.

Two days ago I reviewed this film and I talked a great deal about the advertsing and how it mislead audiences into expecting somethis film isn't (the review is here). I got an email from Isil Bagdadi from CAVU Pictures which is distributing the film saying that I was not being fair to the film focusing on the tag line instead of the film itself. I explained my position and a few more emails went back and forth and I decided that while I have no problem with my original review, Ms Bagdadi was right as well. To that end I decided to do a second review of the film that focuses on the film itself.

SUNSET EDGE is a small scale gem of a film.

This is a lovely coming of age story about four friends hanging out in an abandoned trailer park. The film then gains a bit of shading with a secondary story about a young man going through his deceased father’s possessions. (It’s this last part that gives rise to the misnomer of this being a Hitchcock style thriller).

The two things that stand out about the film are its lyric beauty and it’s sense of reality.

Shot by Karim Lopez SUNSET EDGE is one of the most hypnotic and dream like films of the year. The film is a visual tone poem where light and shadow play in your eye creating a hypnotic reality that burns itself into your subconscious. Even now a week or more since I saw the film I can recall images and tracking shots as if they were my own memories. I wish I could see the world like this.

Watching the film I was hard pressed to accept that half the film wasn’t a documentary. The portion of the film where the four friends are hanging out in the trailer park feels more like fact than fiction. The film has the feel of how I remember a lazy Sunday afternoon with friends when I was growing up. We came together wandered off and then wandered back. The dialog doesn’t have the feel of being written so much as spoken in the moment. I freely admit that part of the reason that it all sounds and feel real is that Haley McKnight as Haley is very close to a long ago friend I knew when I was a bit older than these kids. Watch her up on the screen I had flash back to a time many years ago.

This is a sweet little film that deserves to be seen. This is the sort of film that Unseen Films was created to highlight, small little gems that don’t have an advocate, which need a voice shouting in the wilderness about them. Sunset Edge is not a big flashy production but it’s a more real film that will move you and stay with you longer than the big sugar coated films churned out by the big studios. Make an effort to see it when the film plays in a theater near you (or when it eventually hits VOD)