Verdict
Summary
At nearly three full hours, the crisp looking monochrome-shot Overwhelm the Sky is a costly investment of time for the viewer who must be patient with the languid plot that co-screenwriter and director (and co-editor) Daniel Kremer has derived from a 1799 gothic novel called Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker by Charles Brockden Brown. It’s off-kilter, weird, and not necessarily appealing for even the most adventurous purveyor of bizarre cinema, but it’s unusual and unique, and so it will have its own following.
Plot:
A talk show radio DJ goes on an unexpected odyssey of self-discovery.
Review:
After getting a sweet gig working at a radio station for the midnight crowd, radio personality Eddie Huntly (Alexander Hero, this film’s co-screenwriter) flounders a bit at first at the job, no thanks to a hardass boss who doesn’t especially appreciate him. He doesn’t have much of a social life, but he talks about his fiancé sometimes, and the few times we see him with her, we wonder if it’s for real, or if she’s a figment of his imagination … or his memory. Eddie’s point of view is not exactly to be trusted: He regularly visits a park where a friend of his was murdered, and the first time we see Eddie he’s staring strangely into some shrubs where he sees a hammer and goes to it, picks it up, and has a very strange reaction to it. The hammer triggers something in his psyche; is Eddie having a mental episode, or is something else going on? The movie takes its time in trying to relate all that. Eddie has a friend, an old codger who likes helping people, and one guy – a homeless vagabond who might be a sleepwalker – he helps by paying him a few bucks to pull weeds in his backyard once a week shows up at poker night, but this guy is a cantankerous, antisocial blowhard who clearly doesn’t belong at poker night, much less among the normies of the world. Later, Eddie is at the park where his friend was killed, and he sees the vagabond from poker night and he follows him and because of where he’s at and his really weird behavior, Eddie has a suspicion: He thinks this guy is the man who killed his friend and somehow got away with it. This leads to a half-awake, half-conscious odyssey where Eddie basically leaves his life, his career, and his reality behind in search of answers, but by the time he arrives at the end of his quest, it’s like he’s come full circle into a bass-akwards self-realization where everything we’ve been shown up until then is called into question, and Eddie might not be the guy we thought he was. Is he Eddie? Is he the murdered friend of Eddie? Is he the sleepwalking vagabond? Is anyone still paying attention?
At nearly three full hours, the crisp looking monochrome-shot Overwhelm the Sky is a costly investment of time for the viewer who must be patient with the languid plot that co-screenwriter and director (and co-editor) Daniel Kremer has derived from a 1799 gothic novel called Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker by Charles Brockden Brown. The film is sort of a throwback to the era of the ultra indie explosions from either the early 1970s or the mid-1990’s, depending on your point of view, and while it has echoes of a noir, it doesn’t really commit to being one in its core. It’s much more a straight-ahead Kafka-style bug movie with the character’s state of mind called into question right from the start. It’s off-kilter, weird, and not necessarily appealing for even the most adventurous purveyor of bizarre cinema, but it’s unusual and unique, and so it will have its own following.
Kino Lorber’s DVD release of Overwhelm the Sky comes with an audio commentary by Kremer, hero, and its cinematographer, plus a discussion by the composer, a deleted scene, and the roadshow premier Q & A.
