DELICATE ARCH
https://danceswithfilms.com/delicate-arch/
Filmmaker Matthew Warren brings DWF: LA 2024 audiences DELICATE ARCH, where four college students embark on a camping trip to prepare for the inevitable societal shift due to climate change. When they arrive, visions creep into their waking mind, blurring reality for everyone.
Katie Self is the soothing voice of the narrator. While we hear her only briefly throughout the film, her presence is memorable. Rene Leech plays Ferg with exuberant energy. Their stoner persona is fun and carefree until shit hits the fan.
Kevin Bohleber gives Cody a know-it-all environmentalist vibe. He hides a much more nuanced undertone. Kelley Mack is Wilda. She mixes a breezy girl-next-door quality with authentic emotional baggage.
William Leon gives Grant an upright aura, quickly crumbling as his sense of reality changes at every turn. Leon is beyond compelling. 
The titular location is a real place in Utah. It is striking and entirely isolated, making for an immediately tense premise. The score is haunting and ethereal, comprised of disembodied voices. Scenes in which Grant trips on mushrooms utilize a combination of ever-evolving animation and VHS-style imagery to illustrate his POV. It is trippy.
Tongue-in-cheek dialogue overtly pegs each character by their archetype. Their love for horror and subsequent homages blend into the whirlwind finale.
The film plunges into chaos, further down the rabbit hole as the minutes tick by. Warren makes it impossible to predict. DWF: LA audiences are in for one hell of a ride in DELICATE ARCH. To weirdly quote Mean Girls, “The limit does not exist.” You will question everything.
WRITER/DIR: Matt Warren
PRODS: Larissa Beck, Josh Long, Aaron Nelson, Matt Warren
CAST: William Leon, Kelley Mack, Kevin Bohleber, Rene Leech
Four young friends with fracturing relationships take a camping trip to Southern Utah in order to escape an ecological disaster in the northern part of the state. Alone in the desert, they begin to suspect that their reality might not be as it seems, and soon realize they’re being observed by a mysterious cosmic force.
The hilarious and terrifying overall premise might seem unrealistic to some, but I can tell you it is entirely plausible. When my husband was a first-year associate coming out of grad school at Yale, he passed out on the way to work three days in a row from lack of sleep. After being revived by police officers and refusing medical attention, he arrived five minutes late only to be told, “That’s a YP, a You Problem.” Empathy be damned when there is a dollar or deal to be made.
The film looks spectacular. Sharp cinematography from Ali Armino ups the production ante. Lead performances are fantastic. Everett Osborne and Tommie Earl Jenkins command your attention with dazzling charm and ferocity, making us beg for an expanded world. Without needing to, BURN OUT takes a hard left turn into total WTF near the end of its 12-minute runtime, but the metaphor completely stands. It was unhinged before that choice. Executive Producer Jamie Lee Curtis knows talent when she sees it. Goldman’s voice is fresh, intense, and welcomed.
Stimson Snead takes us on a comedy of trial and error in DWF: LA sci-fi feature TIM TRAVERS AND THE TIME TRAVELER’S PARADOX. This film is a story of a mad genius’s guide to what if, get ready to have your mind blown.
Samuel Dunning is Tim Travers. He is funny, charming, and owns this role. Travers is stubborn as hell and honest to a fault. The character has authentic mad scientist vibes. The number of alternative death scenes and distinctly unique versions of the same character is Multiplicity on crack. Dunning eats it up.
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