THE STORY – Centers on a young man as he navigates the serpentine mystery surrounding his long-missing sister and their family home.
THE CAST – Robbie Banfitch & Leslie Ann Banfitch
THE TEAM – Robbie Banfitch (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 119 Minutes
Something that most horror movies forget to, or pointedly choose not to, reckon with is the human toll of the atrocities they portray in order to scare their audiences. Bodies are torn apart, families are destroyed, and any survivors are unquestionably traumatized. Still, so many scary movies gleefully rush past the ramifications of brutality in favor of quickly moving on to the next frightening moment. Not so with “Tinsman Road,” the new film from Robbie Banfitch, a Swiss Army knife of a filmmaker (count how many times his name appears in the credits and you’ll nearly run out of fingers). This stunning, shattering examination of the pain felt by those left behind after tragedy is just as horrifying as it is upsetting. Banfitch draws the audience in with a shaggy throwback aesthetic and familiar found-footage stylings, ultimately delivering one of the most painful and harrowing depictions of loss and grief since “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.” To watch this film is to experience a true haunting in cinematic form, not just scary, but also mournful and absolutely gutting.
Just as in his previous film, the abstract, bizarrely frightening “The Outwaters,” Banfitch also portrays the central character, Robbie. As “Tinsman Road” begins, he’s just arrived at his childhood home in New Jersey, where his mother Leslie (played by Leslie Ann Banfitch, the director’s real-life mom) lives alone. In the span of just a few years, she’s lost her husband and her daughter, the former passed away, and the latter, Noelle, went missing off the titular road. After a period of estrangement, the prodigal son has returned under the guise of making a documentary about angels (a lie to appease his spiritual mother). Still, his actual intention is to investigate his sister’s disappearance and film everything he can.
For much of the film, it follows a simple pattern. By day, Robbie interacts with his mother as she tells her son about her deep grief and what she believes to be supernatural evidence that Noelle is communicating with her from the other side. He also pokes around Tinsman Road on his own (and without his mother’s knowledge), interviewing and befriending locals who may have interacted with Noelle. And by night, Robbie experiences eerie occurrences around his old home, including his mother’s consistent habit of sleepwalking right into Noelle’s immaculately preserved bedroom.
Banfitch is in no rush. He takes his time, winding the audience around his proverbial finger with long scenes of Robbie exploring the dense woods around Tinsman Road. He rifles through his sister’s belongings, finding unsettling cassette tapes and drawings that he thinks, or rather hopes, may contain clues about his sister’s fate. Through it all, he drinks his way through his unspoken pain and gets into increasingly nasty and pointed fights with his mother. With the entire movie shot on MiniDV tape, it feels like watching someone’s very private home videos. Remember what it was like to overhear your parents getting into an argument? “Tinsman Road” captures that feeling, stripping away the safety of a fourth wall and placing viewers right in the middle of a family going through an unfathomable crisis. And in doing so, Banfitch unsteadily opens his characters’ front door to his audience, inviting them to share in Robbie and Leslie’s hurt thanks to the magical ability of film to act as a shortcut to empathy and understanding. Because of Banfitch’s realistic dialogue exchanges and the heartfelt performances from him and his mother, we, too, begin to yearn for answers and relief just as desperately as they do.
Robbie is a quiet protagonist, spending most of his time behind the camera, only occasionally narrating what he’s witnessing or experiencing. But even without seeing or hearing much from him, it’s clear through Banfitch’s performance that he hurts, having shrunk himself and retreated inward in response to his sister’s vanishing. Leslie’s grief, on the other hand, radiates outward. She has no problem expressing what’s on her mind, no matter how personal or potentially unbelievable it may be. This is especially true when she shares her thoughts on what she sees as Noelle’s communications with her through household objects like a music box and flickering lights. She’s a woman who has come as close to having her life completely eviscerated as humanly possible, and she has no time or reason to put up a wall between her inner thoughts and those who will listen. This dichotomy of conveyed grief between her and her son creates conflict, and even though the pair has little in the world besides each other, the unthinkable losses they’ve both suffered cause them to lash out at one another, even when they both seem to know they need to be there for each other. Such are the unpredictable, at times illogical, ways of true grief, and Banfitch depicts it with heartbreaking honesty.
But that’s not to say the film avoids being scary. “Tinsman Road” is long and winding, using its surprising length (it’s rare for a horror movie to push up to two hours, as this one does) to completely encase viewers in its upsetting world. There’s little relief from the pain, and as might be expected from the tentatively sinister tone of the nighttime scenes, true terror awaits viewers as they drive further down the film’s road. And much like death itself, the inevitability of horror doesn’t make it any less terrifying.
Many contemporary horror films, both found footage and traditionally shot alike, have a real problem effectively capturing darkness or obscuring something for maximum scare factor. Despite being shot on a relatively low-quality format and using only the necessary amount of light, Banfitch (also serving as the film’s cinematographer) never sacrifices visual clarity. Thanks to his thoughtful framing, it’s always clear what we’re meant to focus on or notice on the screen, even when the only light source is a simple flashlight.
Lots of horror films have been described as feeling like something that shouldn’t be watched, something forbidden. This is true of “Tinsman Road,” but not necessarily because it pushes the extremities of what can or should be portrayed as entertainment. Instead, it feels immensely private, almost as if merely viewing it is intrusive. This isn’t just another of the many films that use grief as a central theme; this is closer to a funereal ritual. It’s not about learning a lesson relating to loss; it’s a shattering depiction of what it can do to a person in an almost animalistic sense. With “Tinsman Road,” Banfitch has unlocked a new level of honesty for the horror genre. The best art is truthful to its core, nakedly reflecting the possibilities of the human experience, even the worst parts, as Banfitch’s somber, sincere, sad, and scary film does.
“Tinsman Road” is currently screening in select cities, follow the film’s X account for screening information.
