ESSAY ON THE THIN TIME by Gary Mairs

J.R. Hughto’s The Thin Time shouldn’t work. It’s an absurd conceit, pitting the hoariest art film clichés (the mind as prison, with creativity the only means of escape) against a film noir pastiche. But its parallel structure – every character doubled, the noir mystery bleeding in and out of the art film exercise – fractures and makes strange each overfamiliar detail. As the film lurches forward, all the most laughable elements start to coalesce into a devouring sense of dread, and the film becomes a bad dream you can’t quite shake – or make sense of – for days.

With nods to Vertigo and Nabokov, Frank Miller and James Benning, The Thin Time parades its influences. More than anything, the film resembles the noir dreamscapes of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective or the Kafka-meets-Chandler of Paul Auster’s New York trilogy. There’s a similarly hermetic, insular quality, the sense of a character’s fantasies come all too vividly to life.
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