From Omeleto.
A man finds a missing woman.
OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH is used with permission from Michael Pantozzi. Learn more at https://imdb.com/title/tt27731405.
Tim is a photographer who has retreated into the suburban anonymity of Long Island. Disgruntled with modern life and increasingly reclusive, he’s wiped himself off the Internet, moved back in with his sweetly eccentric mother Margo and avoided seeing friends. But that doesn’t seem to be quite enough to grant him the peace he seeks.
One day Tim is taking photographs when he captures a woman in his frame, one who has been missing for a long time — and apparently can only be seen via camera. He becomes obsessed with this mystery, hoping to find the secret of disappearing completely.
Directed and written by Michael Pantozzi (who also plays the role of Tim), this intriguing, teasing short drama-mystery is a meditation on existence, the seeping of media and cameras into all nooks and crannies of modern life and the roles of solitude and belonging at a time when we are offered the illusion of constant connection online. Its storytelling manages the trick of foregrounding the uncanny in the ordinary, striking a beguiling tone that is also dryly funny in many moments.
Tonally, the storytelling leans into sober atmospherics rather than overt plot mechanics. We meet Tim at his most cloistered, with scenes of his spiky co-existence with his sweetly daffy mother, played by actor Kimmy Robertson, whom many will recognize from David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS television shows and films. As played by Pantozzi, Tim is exhausted with the mores of modern life, and his impatience comes through especially with his mother, who is tethered to social media and her phone at the expense of a vital life in the physical, concrete world. Tim’s milieu, too, has a patina of unreality to it, with its suburban settings rendered in muted yet bright cinematography and layered with a strange, quiet eccentricity that evokes the early films of Hal Hartley, and Pantozzi is adept at portraying a man increasingly unmoored from the larger world.
But when Time captures the long-missing local woman named Ellen on his camera, it forces him out into the world to discover why she doesn’t appear in real life, only screens. What transpires is a mystery to both Tim and the audience. Tim attempts to locate Ellen, but the film does not rush to explain everything — it’s not unlike the strange narrative eddies that David Lynch can find themselves, where a viewer will fall into pockets of liminality and eccentricity. (As a callback to Lynch, Kimmy Robertson’s performance also gestures to the oddness that can thrive in even the most cloistered of spaces.) As Tim goes deeper into this existential rabbit hole, he explores the tension between the peace of being alone and unobserved and the gnawing need to stay connected to others. What he discovers is a kind of negative space, a Wonderland of absence in an all-too-mediated and cluttered modernity.
Enigmatic and deliberately paced with moments of humor, OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH touches on themes of absence and erasure, in both real and digital life — especially in a world where reality and digital identity are sometimes disturbingly commingled. It starts absurd and comical, but it slowly reveals itself to be more unsettling and profoundly melancholic, with a haunting and pensive ending. It never fully explains the metaphysics of its most potent mysteries, but those threads themselves add to the lingering sense of disquiet — a mark of a film that stays with you after the credits roll.
