Robert Machoian is an indie film-maker drawn to a certain type of troubled American masculinity: the type that’s never so toxic as when weak or insecure. His previous drama The Killing of Two Lovers was about male anger, and this tense, suspenseful new film has similar ideas: a Dostoevskian parable set over a single day in remote woodland, with a slow-moving simplicity that belies its storytelling ingenuity and force, and again featuring Machoian’s longtime collaborator, actor-producer Clayne Crawford. This actually looks as if it could have been conceived in the 1970s, with a hint of Boorman’s Deliverance: right down to the Burt Reynolds moustache that the male lead smugly sculpts for himself one morning in front of the shaving mirror, to his wife’s annoyance.
Crawford plays Joseph Chambers, a prosperous insurance salesman and Christian family man who has moved to rural Alabama with his wife Tess (Jordana Brewster) and their two boys, to find a more wholesome place away from the city for the children’s upbringing. But Joseph has got it into his head to have a day’s hunting on his own in some nearby woodland belonging to his friend Doug (Carl Kennedy), to learn some survival skills and generally prove his manhood. Tess, who grew up with a dad and brothers who hunted, and actually knows more about this kind of stuff than her naive city-slicker husband, is dead against him going on his own like this.
Worse still, Joseph doesn’t actually have a rifle and has to borrow Doug’s and soon our bumptious, ignorant, innocent hero is swaggering through the woodland with someone else’s gun, indulging in boyish Walter Mitty fantasies which almost, but not quite, make him likable. Then he sees a deer in the distance and it leads to a terrible crisis. The minute Joseph steps into this disenchanted forest, tripping over every tree root, you can sense the impending disaster, and the horror that Machoian’s movie is moving towards.
• The Integrity of Joseph Chambers is released on 17 April on digital platforms.
