Rory Karpf’s Grace Point, co-written with Paul Russell Smith, opens in medias res, with a shirtless young man running desperately through an avenue of woodland trees. Yet in a way Brandon Hayes (John Owen Lowe) has been running since his childhood, when his alcoholic mother was snatched from him by a deadly accident of her own making. After a wayward adolescence of alienation, addiction and headlong flight from his problems, now Brandon has hit a crossroads. Arrested for drugs possession, he is being driven cross-country by his concerned father Winston to Promise Valley, a rehab centre that is Brandon’s last chance to avoid jail or worse – and in keeping with the film’s themes of recovery and reform, responsible Winston is played by former teen ‘Brat Packer‘ Andrew McCarthy, while the young lead actor is the son of Brat Packer Rob Lowe.
Before they can get there, father and son have a brief stopover in small-town Grace Point. At a gas station there, Winston refills the car while Brandon secretly snorts more powder in the bathroom out back and buys smokes from, and flirts with, local attendant Sophie (Harlan Drum). On their way out of town, the car breaks down, and Winston gets into an altercation with some local men, led by Luther Stone (Sean Carrigan). This escalates so rapidly that before Brandon can even get out of the car, Winston has been shot in the gut and, collapsed onto the ground, shouts to his son, “Run! Run!”
So Brandon runs. Not knowing where his father is, or indeed whether he is even still alive, the young man must fight off Luther’s determined gang of pursuers, his own drug dependence and withdrawal, the resurgent triggers of his traumatic past, and the increasing sense that he is cut off from the world in a Kafka-esque backwoods of America where the normal rules simply do not apply. He will receive help from hulking self-reliant army vet Cutter (Jim Parrack, essentially reprising his rôle from Jonathan Liebesman’s Battle Los Angeles, 2011) who bears wounds – both physical and psychological – of his own, with Sophie occasionally reappearing to offer more ambiguous assistance.
Grace Point is, at least in part, a film about fathers and sons. Brandon’s relationship with Winston might best be described as ambivalent. The young tearaway blames his father – irrationally – for his mother’s death, and has long since left Winston’s orbit of control to pursue his own self-destructive behaviours and the instant relief that they offer for his deep pain. Yet now, in Winston’s genuine absence, Brandon will do anything to get his father back – even as both Cutter and Luther rush in to replace Winston. “Maybe you was worth saving” is how Cutter, expressly compared by Brandon to his own father, explains his willingness to risk even his own welfare in the young man’s interests, while Luther, who addresses Brandon as ‘son’, is like the devil to Cutter’s angel, tempting Brandon with a criminal life of indulgence and freedom to behave as he pleases.
As Brandon is presented with a series of moral choices and conundrums, and must decide whether to remain trapped within his addictions, or to break out into a life of greater responsibility, there are two things that the viewer will quickly notice: the first is that, whether he ever makes it to Promise Valley or not, Brandon’s coming-of-age adventures in Grace Point already represent a highly dramatic form of rehab and recovery; and the second is that in fact very few of Brandon’s experiences in this town make a whole lot of sense on any close scrutiny, even the panicky speed at which events transpire serves as partial cover for this. Why is Winston so quickly shot by complete strangers? What is the nature of Luther’s organisation and his hold over an apparently complicit community? And why is Brandon so central to Luther’s schemes? By the end, there is an answer to all these questions, but along the way, we are made, with Brandon, to feel more as though we are caught in a surreal nightmare than witnessing, with a clear head, the unfolding of a coherent narrative.
Ultimately Grace Point is a bit like David Fincher’s The Game (1997), and a lot like Thomas Jakobsen’s The Unraveling (2015), right down to the undeniable tone of self-righteousness that eventually enters the frame. Still, it is pacy and disorienting – and once it is all over, the apparent neatness of its conclusion is offset by some pleasingly loose ends, allowing some room for reflection. For the viewer is left to ponder how for its protagonist has come over the course of his four delirious days in Grace Point, and what, if anything, its protagonist has really learnt or accomplished besides going cold turkey, and whether rehabilitation is in the end any less cult-like in its revolving rituals than the cycles of addiction itself.
strap: Rory Karpf’s small-town thriller tracks a fugitive young addict on the long and crooked road to rehabilitation
© Anton Bitel
