Gazer Is an Imprecise, Voyeuristic Thriller with a Wavering Attention Span

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For many of us, the spectre of inevitable mental deterioration is one of the aspects of the end of a lifetime that is the most outright terrifying to consider. Imagine, slowly losing everything that makes you, you–your awareness, memories, even your ingrained quirks and most strongly held beliefs. The sad truth of course, is not just that it will happen to all of us eventually, some far-off day in the future, but that it will happen to some people in what is meant to be the prime of their lives. Director Ryan J. Sloan’s debut feature Gazer centers itself around the daily existence of a woman suffering through this kind of deterioration, as she fights the good fight to hold on to whatever bits of a life still remain.

Metrograph Pictures’ Gazer is effectively a neo-noir mystery, one with heavy 1980s and especially 1970s stylistic trappings, with elements of surrealistic horror dancing on the edges. Its unreliable narrator can’t help but recall the likes of Memento, which is probably the most oft-referenced film in Gazer’s own promotional materials, though this influence is blended with that of Lynch and Cronenberg, among others. There are moments that strongly evoke Videodrome, and others that hew closer to gritty, street-level crime thrillers and psychological potboilers, something enhanced by its 16mm cinematography. Unfortunately, despite solid performances and a memorably grimy aesthetic, Gazer doesn’t have quite enough happening in its narrative to keep the balls it’s juggling perpetually aloft, being too long in particular to support its relatively lithe, malnourished frame. It’s trying to coast on its admittedly effective atmosphere just a bit too much, without the supporting structure to undergird it.

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Our protagonist is Frankie (Ariella Mastroianni), a strung-out and addled young mother who is burdened with dyschronometria, a progressive brain condition affecting her ability to remain in the moment and parse the passage of time. Effectively, it means that her own waking mind is always threatening to simply wander away from her, carrying Frankie’s consciousness off into some alien country where she can’t necessarily follow. There are certain triggers, we’re told, that can potentially be more likely to set off one of these episodes, such as repetitive noises, glinting lights, screens, etc. For Frankie, there’s an obvious sense of horror and loss to this inescapable sense of her own brain rebelling against her: She never knows if something is going to drag her off into distraction, and if she’ll suddenly just “wake up” standing in the same place, having been more or less catatonic for hours, with no memory of what has occurred. How she manages to drive a car around without killing herself is a fair question.

To navigate this life, and eliciting those unavoidable Memento comparisons, Frankie makes use of an elaborate array of cassette-taped messages to herself, listening on headphones to her own voice as it instructs her how to stay focused as she completes various tasks. She has tapes specifically for her work shifts at a corner gas station, for commutes, for visiting the grocery store, etc. The tapes provide constant reminders to focus on her surroundings, to process what is happening around her. It’s an imperfect system, and the tapes don’t exactly make her a model employee as they invite her to drink in visual stimulation and imaginary backstories for the people she perceives in the world, but they do at least keep her from dissociating, for the most part. Her days are spent gazing through windows, thinking about the people within, and trying (and failing) to avoid garbled flashbacks to the bloody night when her husband died of a (self-inflicted, or homicidal?) bullet to the head. Her young daughter, meanwhile, lives with her former husband’s mother, held at arm’s length from the deteriorating Frankie, who is effectively being told to go off and die as she sees fit, no longer welcome to be part of her daughter’s life thanks to the risks of her condition.

It’s during one of those cassette-aided evenings that Frankie witnesses some hints of violence and conflict that throw Gazer’s scraggly plot into motion. A seemingly chance meeting leads to an opportunity to make some extra money for her daughter, skirting the boundaries of the law for what she’s assured is a noble cause. Of course it all goes wrong in short order, leaving Frankie attempting to piece together the true identities and motivations of these new people she’s recently encountered. Long sections are relatively wordless, as the camera trots behind the diminutive Mastroianni, following her as she tails an individual or records new tapes with her suspicions, in case she forgets. The actress has a waifish quality that reminds me a bit of Emma Corrin, though Gazer is immeasurably more lo-fi, low-tech a project than the slick likes of Hulu’s A Murder at the End of the World, in which Corrin was trying to solve a crime of her own. This is a film that exists in back alleys, warehouses, fire escapes and phone booths, away from the eyes of polite society. All of its faces are weathered, haggard, bruised.

The trouble is that there’s not a ton of meat on these bones, nor is the central mystery integrated particularly well into the challenges that Frankie faces through her condition, which would already be a potent existential crisis all on its own. Gazer can often feel like it’s stalling for time as we amble along with the rudimentary detective work, which makes one wonder why the film stretches out to almost a full two hours. You would think that a filmmaker would respond to relatively meager resources and a thin script by going shorter rather than longer, but instead Gazer continues going back to the well through rehashes of the same experiences–particularly the flashbacks to the night of her husband’s death, which are reiterated several times too many. At some point, the audience can be trusted to understand where Frankie’s mind is carrying her off to.

At the same time, there are stretches in which Gazer becomes oddly engrossing despite being a little threadbare. There are moments of genuine suspense, as when Frankie infiltrates a potentially dangerous man’s home in search of several key items. Mastroianni herself becomes increasingly likable in her determination to see these unanswered questions through to the end, even when it would be easier for her to simply withdraw. Through its winding threads, the film and Mastroianni’s strained performance make us want to see her do right by her daughter in particular. That desire makes the film’s ambiguous ending feel simultaneously triumphant and tragic; Frankie does what she feels she has to do in the moment, but we know with little reservation that things aren’t going to end well.

Where Gazer thrives is in the establishment of its grim, septic-looking world, lit seemingly entirely in the glow of diner fluorescents and neon street signs. It evokes deep feelings of loss and hopelessness, giving a depth of pain for Mastroianni to strive against–there’s just not quite enough for her to do. Still, as first features go, this is a largely engaging effort from Ryan J. Sloan, just one that could perhaps have been pared down into a more tightly focused thriller.

Director: Ryan J. Sloan
Writers: Ryan J. Sloan, Ariella Mastroianni
Stars: Ariella Mastroianni, Renee Gagner, Luis Arroyo Jr., Tommy Kang
Release date: April 4, 2025 (Metrograph Pictures)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.