In their first collaboration as co-directors, filmmakers Joe DeNardo and Paul Felten construct an enigmatic film capable of jumping from one genre to another, offering multiple faces. The relationship
between Stephanie, an actress making her way in New York, and Gerard, an intelligence agent, begins as strangely as it ends, and when it ends Stephanie starts living with a group of musicians, with whom she doesn't seem to find her place either. With a scripted structure that breaks down the chronology of events and evocative 16mm photography, Slow Machine oscillates between what its characters want and what they get, as the narrator warns in the opening sequence. At times the film's dreamlike, polyhedral forms have distant echoes of David Lynch, and part of its plot resonates with the teenage conflict of Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007). Felten and DeNardo create a universe in which you are absorbed by a cold suspense, where everything could have been otherwise. NURIA CUBAS