‘Plasma’ wanders into pointlessness – ‘Love’ recreates semi-forgotten subgenre

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Late in “For the Plasma”, Anabelle Le- Mieux’s character, Charlie, complains to her employer Helen (Rosalie Lowe) that her job — and her overriding purpose — at the secluded Maine cabin where they’re living and working together makes no sense. Moviegoers are apt to feel likewise about Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan’s indie head-scratcher, which operates according to its own dreamy wavelength, disregarding traditional narrative structure or lucidity at every turn.

Equally entrancing and off-putting, this low-budget curio will have more luck attracting a cult audience on home video than in theaters, where its prospects are as murky as its plot. At a picturesque house nestled amongst towering trees, Charlie arrives to serve as the assistant to longtime friend Helen, who spends her days monitoring the surrounding forest for possible wildfi res via CCTV security cameras that feed video to her residence’s bank of computer monitors. While that may be her nominal task, however, Helen promptly informs Charlie that, by staring at her screens’ images of trees for hours on end, she’s been able to achieve a kind of epiphany about spatial perspectives and relationships that, in turn, has allowed her to accurately predict stock market fl uctuations — and thus earn her regular checks from (unidentifi ed) employers.

Charlie takes this befuddling, bonkers revelation in stride, as she does her chore of going into the woods to further investigate the area’s trees. There, she discovers white, rectangular frames hanging by wire in front of the cameras — denoting the visual spaces being recorded — though their origins or functional intentions are left vague by directors Bryant and Molzan, who pace their fi lm like a laconic reverie headed toward some indistinct destination.

Or, rather, they stage it like a hazy, spiraling hallucination determined to double back on itself, as suggested by a scene in which Helen draws circles on a newspaper to explain how she foresees the fi nancial sector’s future, and Charlie responds by illustrating a tale about a Japanese bug that travels in a circular pattern. Centered around a remote cabin located in some sort of pseudo-sci-fi -horror netherworld, “For the Plasma” faintly recalls Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s sterling 2012 thriller “Resolution.” Nonetheless, despite talk about ghosts and some faint inklings of outer-space enigmas — the latter via a meeting between Helen and two Japanese businessmen who ask her to study lunar telescope- snapped shots of distant galaxies — Bryant and Molzan’s fi lm exhibits no interest in adhering to, or subverting, familiar genre conventions.

Instead, their feature debut (shot on 16mm in a constricting 4:3 aspect-ratio, the better to lend it an ’80s-ish aesthetic vibe) operates as something akin to a uniquely bizarre expression of its milieu, a sleepy New England locale of battered lobster shacks, placid rock quarries, and rustic lighthouses where the salty air seems infused with indefi nable but ever-present mystery.

By Nick Schager

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