• Directed by David Ocanas
• Written by Robert Nelms
• Starring
  • Poppy Montgomery
  • Adam Kaufman
  • Jose Yenque
  • Patricia Reyes Spindola
  • Danny Pino
• Produced by Frank Donner, Robert Nelms, David Ocanas and Margot Rogers Ocanas

Of the relatively few reviews of this movie available, most have given it a much more negative assessment than I’m about to, mostly revolving around the “inexplicable” nomination of such an “unoriginal” and “derivative” film for the Grand Jury prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. I’ll grant that it’s definitely an unoriginal film, and what’s more, I can’t cite the movie it most closely resembles without giving away the entire ending. However, I don’t hold lack of originality as a mortal sin in movies, as long as the movie is still thoughtful and well-executed. (And anyway, it’s not like most Sundance contenders are truly that original — they’re just derivative in correct, acceptable ways.) It’s probably because I spend a lot of time “across the tracks” from those other reviewers. Case in point: They all recognized star Poppy Montgomery as star of the seven-season CBS TV show Without a Trace; me, I just said, “She sure looks a lot like one-time B-movie queen Tanya Dempsey.”

The main flaw to this movie — and this is the thing I normally tell you at the end of the review instead of the beginning, but I’m sure I’ll find something else to say when I get there — is that it is very much a director’s movie. First-time director David Ocanas is clearly more concerned with how he tells his story than what story he tells. (Symptomatic of that: The DVD commentary is given by Ocanas and supervising sound editor William Levins — no offense to the sound design, which was one of the high points of the production — while screenwriter Robert Nelms, who wrote the script based on a treatment that he and Ocanas hammered out, is mentioned once, I think.) With that kind of production focus, it’s no wonder that there are lots of visually intriguing scenes which don’t make a lot of sense, and the ones that do make sense add up to a whole less than the sum of its parts.

Yet more proof that every woman in the world except my wife wears something sexy to sleep in.

Montgomery is Nadine Roberts, a young married Chicago attorney who, as we raise the curtain, is being plagued by odd dreams of a Mexican city. A visit from a police detective, looking for her distant sister Dianne who disappeared on a recent trip to Tijuana, and a broken-up phone call that may have been from Dianne spur her to action. Her attentive husband James (Adam Kaufman) doesn’t want to run off half-cocked, and wants to delay a few days so he can arrange his business responsibilities, so Nadine throws together a bag and heads down to Tijuana on her own.

In other words, you know up front that this movie will be a surreal, rationality-defying experience. Because the idea that an otherwise level-headed attorney (a Chicago attorney, no less) decides to travel alone to a foreign country whose language you don’t speak, to a city notorious for its flamboyant crime, to investigate as a single woman the disappearance of another, similarly ill-prepared woman… It boggles the mind and strains the suspension of disbelief.

“Yes, every policeman in Mexico looks like Erik Estrada. Regulations.”

In Tijuana, her first stop is the police station, where Detective Santos (Jose Yenque) gently tries to dissuade her; people who go missing in Tijuana are either dead, or they don’t want to be found. Eitrher way, the odds that she’s still even in Tijuana are slim. “People only come through here on their way to someplace else.” Nadine reacts to that by acting like the well-meaning but clueless American, castigating the police for letting cases go unsolved. Then on her way out of the police station, she has a dizzy spell and…

…She dreams about her dead mother (Alan Stewart), reading to a little-girl version of her or Dianne (it’s not clear which) in bed. When Nadine wakes up, she’s in a strange hotel room. The desk clerk (Danny Pino) seems to recognize her, but thinks she’s Dianne. (Wait — so Dianne is Nadine’s twin sister? Then why doesn’t she mention that at the police station, instead of showing them a photo which will look just like her? Or is the desk clerk supposed to have a “all blonde gringas looks alike to me” attitude?) In fact, when Nadine came in last night, she was apparently acting like Dianne, asking for a replacement room key and checking for messages.

Hm. White on one side, black on the other, gray in the middle… do you think it could mean something?

Nadine then tosses the room to see if there’s any sign of Dianne, and finds hidden in the sink’s P-trap a paper with a name on it: Maria Alfonso Gonzalez. A trip back to the police station tells her that Maria was another missing girl, one who vanished six months ago while on an errand for her mother. A trip with Detective Santos to Mrs. Gonzalez’s (Patricia Rayes Spindola) house ups the weird factor: Mrs. Gonzalez says the vague but meaningful things that we’re come to expect from non-Caucasians in horror movies, and her younger daughter stares at Nadine knowingly. (In response to this and other events, Nadine stares back, but in that mystified manner that Nic Cage does so well.)

The weirdness gets more intense. Nadine dreams that she follows her mother onto a bus; when she wakes, someone slips a schedule for an out-of-commission bus under her door. With Santos’ help, she goes to the junkyard where the bus is surrounded by dozens of rusting police cars, and finds a whole bunch of alarm clocks under a tarp, all showing the same time: 5:32. When she gets back to the hotel, she finds her husband James there, smiling and willing to help, but also trying to get her to come home to see the new house he’s put an offer on. And for some reason, he slips and calls her “Dianne.”

Whaddaya mean, there aren’t enough cop cars in Tijuana? Take a look around!

The dreams start coming more fast and furious, and in both the dreams and real life, people say more and more things that are unclear but ominous. Why do some events seem to keep happening to her, like deja vu? Why do more and more people insist that she’s Dianne? Why does Maria Gonzalez’s body get discovered, then disappear from the morgue, then reappear back where it was found originally? Why, sleeping alone in a foreign and mysterious country, does Nadine sleep in a thin and unprotective negligee?

It’s a beautifully made movie, from the cinematography to the editing to the musical score and sound design, but I have to admit: I guessed where it was going about twenty or thirty minutes into it. There are enough clues that any reasonably literate viewer — one who’s seen Carnival of Souls or Jacob’s Ladder or The Sixth Sense, or even read the classic story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce — can lay money on the outcome. I’m not saying that it all makes sense then; some parts of it never really make any sense (what was all that with Maria Gonzalez, anyway?), but it at least hold together.

“You know, we look terrific when we’re sweaty.”

For what it is, then — and what it is is a new rendition of a very familiar story — it’s a not bad example of its type. But its type practically never gets invited to Sundance, which make it understandable that reviewers who saw it there were outraged that this piece of pseudo-pulp took away time which would be better spent in another feature-length documentary about a Third World sports team.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 3, I think
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 4, depending on your definition
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Johanna Watts (another attorney in Nadine’s firm) played “Gannet Brooks” in two episodes of Enterprise