A lonely woman sees something she can't unsee in 'Gazer,' an industrious thriller

A small, hunched New Jersey pistillate named Frankie with aggravated eyes and a terrible pixie chopped is the cardinal protagonist of the low-budget enigma “Gazer,” from first-time diagnostic manager Ryan J. Sloan. You’d beryllium forgiven for thinking, fixed her her drawn, caved-in appearance, hoodie-shrouded and everlastingly preoccupied with self-recorded cassette tapes, that she’d typically beryllium a bit-player oddity successful idiosyncratic else’s paranoid thriller.

But this lonely voyeur with a debilitating neurological upset — played with haunted vigor by prima and co-writer Ariella Mastroianni — is simply a large crushed this unusual duck of a nerve-jangler compels the mode it does. When its cinematic influences aren’t truthful evident and its communicative particulars aren’t distractingly fuzzy, this earnestly moody movie serves announcement that indie municipality noir tin inactive beryllium a potent calling paper for up-and-coming talents.

The movie’s DIY-to-OMG backstory unsocial is invigorating: A movie-mad New Jersey electrician, manager Sloan and his cinephile collaborator Mastroianni crammed successful filming connected weekends implicit 2 years, past shockingly landed “Gazer” successful the Directors’ Fortnight astatine past year’s Cannes Film Festival, an unheard-of triumph for truthful unpedigreed an entry. Perhaps the French gatekeepers had successful caput their ain storied past of obsessives-turned-filmmakers similar François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard and took a radiance to the profoundly ingrained movie-ness of it all.

For 1 thing, from the choky opening changeable connected Mastroianni’s eyes, “Gazer” offers that reliable conception of a witnessed crime. Frankie, her dependable successful her ears telling her to announcement everything astir her arsenic a mode of not zoning out, is expected to beryllium concentrating connected her occupation pumping gas. But she’s focused alternatively connected the flat artifact crossed the thoroughfare and what she believes to beryllium an enactment of unit silhouetted successful a window. A disheveled pistillate past emerges from the broadside of the building, meets Frankie’s look and moves disconnected into the night.

Later, astatine a grief support-group meeting, that aforesaid woman, Paige (Renee Gagner), introduces herself, expresses fearfulness of an abusive member and asks if Frankie tin assistance her, for which she’ll pay. Frankie needs the money: She’s a young widow eking retired a meager beingness without custody of her young girl and with an erratic information that causes her to suffer blocks of time. Sleep isn’t overmuch assistance acknowledgment to enigmatic body-horror nightmares evoking the circumstances surrounding her husband’s death. But much immediately, thing astir that mysterious alien turns retired to beryllium what it seems, and abruptly Frankie’s beingness is successful danger.

In different words, hello, Hitchcock, De Palma, Nolan, Cronenberg, Lynch and Lodge Kerrigan (“Keane”) for bully measure. And yet nary of that is truly a minus, since Sloan, moving successful evocatively dingy performance with cinematographer Matheus Bastos crossed a concrete-jungle playground of warehouses, motels and broadside streets, inactive achieves his ain aura of roiling unease with each unsighted corner.

Sloan’s rough-and-tumble peekaboo crippled is exemplary for a first-timer. I privation the aforesaid could beryllium said astir his overlong dream-logic interludes, which tantalize arsenic peeks into Frankie’s psyche but yet consciousness similar benignant filler. That besides goes for his vague attraction of Frankie’s real-life condition, called dyschronometria. Losing clip sounds similar it should slot neatly into a ticking-clock suspense film, but it ne'er achieves liftoff the mode “Memento” turned an amnesiac’s regular conflict into catnip.

Better and truer than that quality gimmick, though, is the well-realized, lived-in pall of Frankie’s bittersweet existence, which imbues her problem-solving endurance with a genuinely fresh, in-the-bones urgency. As damaged heroes go, Mastroianni easy keeps our attraction and triggers our sympathies for idiosyncratic who resists the abyss, arsenic adjacent to it arsenic she is. “Gazer” suggests thing of a agleam aboriginal for the plucky, assured genre enthusiasts who’ve willed it into existence.