How much can one ninety-minute film reasonably do within its timeframe? Can a film successfully go from awkward laughs to gore, from femmes fatales to OTT-ultraviolence, and from slacker humour to shock? Rondo (2018) believes it’s not only possible, it’s all part and parcel of its overall appeal. Both the ethos and the resulting movie have a few little drawbacks, but overall, I’d say those behind the film manage to balance these things pretty well. Due to its content this will not be a film for everyone, but if you can laugh and squirm at the same time, you might well be okay with this one.
After a dishonourable discharge, Paul (Luke Sorge) is struggling to cope with flashbacks of the (undisclosed) event which led to him coming home early to Denver, Colorado. He starts drinking to forget – a strategy which ultimately fails, and so he ends up living with his sister Jill (Brenna Otts). Jill wants him to dry out and get his life back on track; luckily, it turns out that she’s recently met a local therapist, so she packs Paul off for an appointment.
So far, so standard: however, the therapist in question (Gena Shaw) is anything but orthodox in her advice. Instead of writing a prescription, she has another idea. Most men of Paul’s age, she says, could be more or less fixed if they only got laid a bit more. Does this sound accurate in his case? Unperturbed by his bewildered silence, she starts guessing at his kinks, and tells him she knows just the place. Still bewildered, and still saying very little, Paul later finds himself arriving at a well-to-do apartment, with a password to get into something called a ‘Rondo’ party.
If they weren’t already on your radar, it’s at about this point that the film’s black comedy elements begin to rise. As Paul and some of the other gatherers listen to the ‘rules of the road’ for this party, the script modulates between comedic and downright sleazy; if the film showed half the things it describes, it’d have an X rating, which makes the steady delivery of certain lines by the host, Lurdell (Reggie De Morton) seem all the more uneasily funny. Paul’s suspicions about this place and this set-up are ultimately – and quickly – confirmed, so he decides to disappear. But he can’t just do that, or put this strange night behind him. It’s not as simple as that.
Alongside Paul, the audience is now invited to look again at certain scenes and see them in a newly – or should that be more – sinister light, but throughout, we’re made to wonder with him whether this isn’t all the result of the DTs, rather than evidence that something serious is going on here. This is an enjoyable plot twist technique, which makes the best of things we’ve already seen on screen; this isn’t the last time the film successfully double-crosses its characters and audience, either. Rondo never lets you settle into knowing who to trust, who to doubt, or indeed to trust in who’s going to take centre stage, at least not until the final act.
Publicity for this film declares it an ‘extreme horror/thriller’, which I’m suspicious is a slightly frustrated attempt to place the film into a recognisable, and of course saleable, genre category. However, when I read those words, I begin to think of films like Saw or Hostel: there are horror elements in Rondo, but it certainly wouldn’t sit well alongside those titles and has only a little in common with perhaps one of them. Rondo is a film which wants to be many things. In fact, one of its best-intentioned flaws is the sheer amount it strives to do. Moving from PTSD to family drama, to sleaze, to crime thriller, to neo-noir and finally into an OTT exploitation denouement which ends things on a very different note, this is a film which is very difficult to categorise, and it’s a heck of a lot to do on what I’m sure was a small budget. I can only imagine what this would have looked like with a few extra zeros on the end of that budget. Still, there are some great ideas here, a good cast who work well with the material, and shortage of ambition is not something I’ll be associating with writer/director Drew Barhardt any time soon. Yes, there are a few head-scratching decisions (the occasional use of voiceover, for this reviewer, was intrusive where it featured) but I can hand on heart say I was engaged throughout by this challenging but aspiring indie.
Rondo will be making its world premiere at Fantasia International Film Festival on July 27th 2018. For more details on the festival, please click here.