Drive Back had its UK première at FrightFest 2024, 23 August
At the beginning of Cody Ashford’s feature debut Drive Back, the boy Reid (Zoltan Torok) sees a buck get shot only feet away from where he is doodling in a sketchbook on the woodland floor, and is then horrified when his father (Robert Lewis Stephenson) offers him a hunting knife with which to kill and skin the dying creature. This is a primal scene, where little Reid has his first camping trip in the woods with his dad and his first encounter with death, both rites of passage, and where indeed he is blooded – and the trauma of this experience lasts long into his adulthood.
Yet the picture that Reid is drawing just before his innocence is forever lost is, significantly, an ouroboros– a symbol suggesting that there are no starting points or closures, no primal scenes, just paradoxical circles without end. Reid may imagine that the deer’s bloody demise marked his entry to adulthood, but even as he moves further forward down the road of life, he is always simultaneously travelling back, telling and retelling that childhood story to explain both his dislike of the great outdoors, and his distant relationship with his father, as though both those things had not already been true back there in the woods.
Now Reid (Zack Gold) is all, or at least mostly, grown up – but, as a failed cartoonist, he is still doodling, still taking polaroids with the same camera he had as a boy, and drifting with a certain ambivalence into marriage with his pregnant girlfriend Olivia (Whit Kunschik). Reid and Olivia are in love, but although they are now committed to settling down and having a family together, they cannot help looking back to a time when their relationship was more troubled. What happened is in the past, and they have tried to put it behind them, but a lingering sense of betrayal and recrimination still haunts them, casting its shadow over the future that they hope to make with each other.
After an engagement party at his dad’s place out in East California, the couple takes the long drive back to the city. Turned around en route after a near collision, they stop in for directions at The I Forgot Store where weird old Wendy (Madonna Young Magee) – whose husband Ben (Alan Dorfmeier) sits slumped and possibly dead behind the counter – recommends that they take a shortcut. “It’s perfect for a couple like the two of you,” she says. “It’s a beautiful scenic drive. You’ll have plenty of time to talk. You might even learn something new about each other. It did wonders for our relationship.”
As he leaves with Olivia, Reid tries to rationalise the elderly couple’s eccentric behaviour, suggesting “being stuck together for that long in a place like that has to make you go a little crazy” – and then they are off, driving forward along a misty forest route that should get them home faster, but where instead they travel in infuriating circles, while suffering nightmarish visions and bouts of amnesia (I Forgot) to add to their increasing disorientation. The old limping hitchhiker (Jim Tuck) whom they pass several times seems relatively harmless, but there is also a hooded figure armed with crowbar and hunting knife who relentlessly pursues them with malicious intent wherever they go – even as they are also hounded by their own mutual suspicion and bitter conflict.
Scripted by Jon Sarro, Ashford’s film is like a merger of Jeremy Lovering’s In Fear (2013), Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s The Endless (2017), Dane Elcar’s Brightwood (2022) and Karoline Lyngbye’s Superposition (2023), taking these lost souls on a ride backwards and forwards through multiple criss-crossing variations of their relationship. Whether this is a sci-fi Twilight Zone, or a post-crash purgatory (in a place whose very name, Charon County, is suggestive of underworld passage), Drive Back offers scenes from a marriage in polaroid-like snapshot, collapsing all the good and bad in this couple’s relationship into a short stretch of backroad that loops back on itself, echoing into infinity. Here, even as Reid and Olivia’s love is repeatedly threatened, as it was before, by a third party, they are also their own worst enemies and their best hopes – and perhaps love will find a way, no matter how paradoxical its trajectory.
strap: Cody Ashford’s road horror catches an engaged but ambivalent couple in an infernal loop on a lost highway
© Anton Bitel
