Starfish (2019)

**½/****
starring Virginia Gardner, Christina Masterson, Eric Beecroft
written and directed by A.T. White

by Alice Stoehr Leadville, Colorado is a couple hours' drive from Denver. Ensconced among the Rockies, it has the highest elevation of any American city. The town's forbidding winter serves as the backdrop for the apocalyptic horror of Starfish. Essentially a one-woman show, the film stars actress Virginia Gardner (of last year's Halloween) as Aubrey, a DJ with tousled blond hair and a mustard sweater. She's visiting for the funeral of her friend Grace, whose loss devastates her and sets a pervasively wistful tone. That night, she sneaks into Grace's apartment, immersing herself in what are now keepsakes: her vinyl collection, her yellowing letters, her surviving pet jellyfish and turtle. Fernanda Guerrero's production design is precise and analog, suggesting a place where dust has recently begun to settle. Aubrey peeks through an antique telescope and sees a neighbour's window, this distant vertical block in a sea of darkness. A man and a woman strip, then climb into bed together. "Perv," laughs Aubrey. Later, she lies on her late friend's couch and stares up at the wooden ceiling, where she envisions that same couple superimposed as she tries to masturbate. The first quarter of the film abounds with these lonely details. A slow zoom into an old TV's convex screen reveals Aubrey's faint reflection as she talks to her mom on a curly-corded landline. Eventually, she falls asleep, and the plot begins in earnest.

The sci-fi premise asserts itself mostly through omens and intimations. The town in which Aubrey awakes is all clouds of smoke, blood-splattered windows, and snowy streets devoid of people. A monster--initially unseen, later found to have a Gigeresque row of fangs across its scalp--sometimes dogs her path. She receives instruction first from a crackly male voice on a walkie-talkie, then from an audio cassette Grace left behind that sends her on a scavenger hunt for tapes scattered all around the town. They constitute "the signal," an enigmatic noise somehow responsible for the current disaster. Writer-director A.T. White comes from an audio background; he's been a podcast host and a singer-songwriter with the band Ghostlight. His debut feature, for which he naturally wrote the score, leans heavily on sound design for its atmosphere. Rustling strings that occasionally recall Penderecki dovetail with ambient growls, clicks, and burbles. The film's budget was clearly low, and much of it involves Aubrey either ducking around dead cars in a wolf parka or languishing in the apartment. The lively soundscape suggests a whole uncanny world that never appears onscreen. So central is Starfish's soundtrack that midway through it lies an animated music video set to "Porchlight," a 1998 single from the British band Seafood. For a few minutes, it renders Gardner and the Leadville exteriors through lustrous artwork. A subsequent vignette has Aubrey finding a clapperboard labelled Starfish in a library. She briefly skulks around the film's set and sees the real Gardner before snapping back into her native fiction. Neither of these interludes amounts to much; neither fits or advances the overarching mythology. They act primarily as surreal diversions from a film so narrow it might otherwise induce cabin fever.

Once the world begins to end about half-an-hour in, the screenplay tends to move in circles. The same tantalizing imagery continues to tantalize, but the pacing's baggy. Though this works as desolate sci-fi, like the Kiwi classic The Quiet Earth or last year's A Quiet Place, it lacks either of those predecessors' forward thrust. By planting Aubrey in one place, White's likely trying to demonstrate the stagnation brought on by grief. The scavenger hunt, however, is too whimsical and the genre plotting too involved for the film to pull off that mode. Starfish's faults might be best described in culinary terms: half-baked, undercooked, like a soufflé that's failed to rise. It's a showcase, really, for White's visual acuity, Gardner's ability to act solo, and the effects team's CGI monster designs. (At one point, Aubrey pauses to watch a many-legged behemoth lumber across the frame, and the sight is duly impressive.) Lyricism with a palette of frosty pastels is nothing to scoff at. The first act of Starfish, with its oblique dialogue and shallow focus, is so lovely that it scarcely requires the pleasant if shallow film beyond it.