Unwritten is a 2019 thriller about an author whose unfinished book could spell the end for everyone.
It’s a little hard to wrap your head around what exactly is going on in writer and director Dale Neven‘s earnest but unbalanced effort Unwritten, a low budget independent feature that works hard to be trippy. It’s got clever written all over it, with a tragic, unhinged writer at the center of it and a plot with mystery and suspense, yet can’t find the right track in getting it delivered, the film a loosely-made character study that unravels the more it tries to wind things up.
Deep in the deserts of Nevada, near Area 51, Albert (Gabriel Burrafato) lives alone in an expansive used book store that is mostly boarded up. He’s afraid to go outside, sleeping on a cot in the backroom and feeding on a huge cache of instant noodle soup. His only company is a tortoise, an unfinished book he’s written, and the haunting memories of a childhood accident. One day, however, his estranged teenage daughter Liv (Brittany Hoza) shows up on her motorcycle, seeing his deplorable condition and calls a psychiatrist (Ben Stobber) to stop by and check in on her father. Too bad for him, by this time, Albert is convinced a customer named Sherwood (Mark Justice) in in fact a character in his book and come to blow up the world. Now’s he got to do anything to stop him. But at what cost?
Neven isn’t playing by the rules per se, his claustrophobic exercise in madness a supremely odd experience of uneven performances, bizarre flashbacks, military armageddon, and just plain weird storytelling techniques, all things I would have no problems with except there is just no cohesion to any of it. With its mostly single set approach, it comes off like a filmed stage play with a lot of rattled conversation about a story that Albert never finished, clearly becoming a metaphor for a man trapped by agoraphobia, or at least I think so. I hope so.
Little of all this is convincing, especially when we travel back to Albert’s childhood for some brief moments of him and his mentally challenged brother (Ethan Patton), the two playing in a place they really ought not to be. These scenes and cutaways to an airbase, where three people (including Lorenzo Lamas) seem in control of a weapon dozens should be are part and parcel to a movie with good ideas but lost in execution. That’s mostly because Neven wants this to be a very specific thing with a twisty end, but that cat is let out of the bag far too early and robs the blandly-committed finale of any impact, not to mention introducing a fantastical element that because more than one person actually sees it – meaning it’s not just in Albert’s head – would fundamentally change our very definition of reality.
But then again, I might have just opened up a whole new can of worms here and inadvertently answered my own questions about the movie. The thing is, these questions just aren’t compelling enough to matter, the story lacking that essential circle of suspect we need in asking the most important question of all: what’s real and what’s not? And so, Unwritten plays out with all kinds of potential, yet deflated from the start. Absolutely, it is a curiosity, but no doubt most will find this entirely inaccessible.