If you know little more than the title of The Sentimental Engine Slayer going into it, then it’s undeniably dissonant when the main character tries to strangle a prostitute in a dingy hotel room in the opening scene.
The film is the brainchild of The Mars Volta guitarist and songwriter Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, who produced, wrote, directed and stars in his debut feature.
Rodriguez-Lopez’s cavernous, ambling vision gets put to the test in the form of a micro-budgeted psychedelic drama.
It’s a semi-autobiographical Southwestern bildungsroman told out of sequence and absent of temporal foundation. The scenes that the film returns to so as to fill the time gap are still flat despite an enlightened revisit. Even those briefly normal scenes in his bedroom are punctuated by an oblique, immensely lyrical voiceover.
Barlam is a twenty-something grocer confined to a desolate El Paso neighborhood and his hobby of collecting and assembling ’67 Mercury Cougar model cars. His drug-addicted sister lives in a perpetual daze, and his coworkers bully him for being sexually inexperienced. An encounter with his hipper doppelganger furthers his existential confusion.
Given that Rodriguez-Lopez at 34 looks half his age, he’s convincing as the lead. Yet attempts at naturalism are moot when Barlam’s cloudy motives are relentlessly shrouded in naïve trial-and-error.
Rodriguez-Lopez’s nonlinear script and empirical direction takes a cue or two from Alejandro González Iñárritu and Steven Soderbergh.
With the musician credited as the film’s composer and John Frusciante as executive producer, one can’t help but take note of the minimalist blasts of amplified fuzz and static on the soundtrack. The hallmarks of prog rock crop up sporadically as the film’s bookends.
The Sentimental Engine Slayer mixes the familiar and the foreign in how it flip-flops between English and Spanish but also in its aim to link violence against the sexually depraved to the everyday pressures of a fresh-faced youth entering adulthood.
Everyone has a sex story, and Barlam’s insecurity and detachment from the norms of intimacy sets him apart from everyone else in his life.
But Barlam’s devirginization is immaterial when compared to the grandiose life questions Rodriguez-Lopez poses at every turn, but can’t even attempt to rationalize.
6 out of 10