Review of Detour (1992) by Eric H — 01 Jun 2015

A memorably committed rendition of the lonely man - he drifts into the movie, hitch-hiking through an ominous, almost abstractly minimal landscape, and an hour later more or less drifts out, musing in voice over about the finger of fate.

The voice over is eloquent enough, but the images tell us all we need to know. Neal etches a keenly moving portrait of isolation: his initially hard-bitten quality wears comprehensively away, until his scenes with the evil Vera are so over- matched that they conjure up a weird black (castrating) domestic comedy.

Savage (whose first turn of her head toward the camera after he picks her up is one of the most unnerving close-ups in memory) pushes her performance to the feverish hilt. Tightly and claustrophobically shot, in a world drained of all colour or digression or respite, it's a fascinating film at every step.

The girlfriend he pursues to Hollywood is so abstractly presented she seems like a dream; when he calls her in one scene it's as if he was talking to himself, and in the end she just fades away from view, as if any thought of respectability or stability was a sad delusion; as if the inevitable reality is just hollow, rootless disaffection.

Vera may be the medium of his destruction, but his identity is never sufficiently secure to facilitate direct recrimination (only fate could do that): he's the little man caught up in money and female desire and dreams of betterment, and it beats him down.

A profoundly pessimistic (and somewhat visionary) prediction of the post-War landscape.