Detour

A little more than halfway through William Dickerson’s Detour, the film’s protagonist, trapped in his truck deep underground, takes a moment to ponder and appreciate a tiny ant that has crawled into his vehicle (and potential tomb). The ant bites him. So much for kinship amongst the tiny and powerless. The metaphor is both obvious and apt—before the immensity of Nature, best-laid plans and self-centric lives are absurdly inconsequential. Ignore this disparity at your own peril. (But don’t be afraid to put up a fight, anyway.)
Despite doubling as a plausibility-straining endorsement for the battery life of Apple’s iPhone, Dickerson’s claustrophobic survival thriller proves itself a technically proficient, expertly paced affair. It hews awfully close to films like 2010’s Buried and 127 Hours—the basic story structure is, in fact, identical—though Dickerson is said to have had the script in play back in 2008 before it suffered a string of all-too-common Hollywood setbacks. (These included promised financing disappearing or made contingent on rewriting to make a producer’s wife the star, and multiple undisclosed big name actors pulling out due to the delays.) While the aforementioned movies found their footholds with It-List stars like Ryan Reynolds and A-List directors like Danny Boyle, respectively, Dickerson’s film had a few more years to serve in development purgatory.