Too Late

Mel Sampson is a private investigator in Los Angeles. A call comes; a woman is missing and the caller is somebody from his past. The film is in five parts, each set on a hilltop, in a strip club, in a cinema or in a motel room. The parts are not in order; the cause of something in one scene turns up in another. Mel is a little too late every time, and the matter is not solving a murder but seeing what was missed and when. Dennis Hauck wrote and directed. John Hawkes, Vail Bloom, Joanna Cassidy, Jeff Fahey and Dichen Lachman are in the cast. It is an American production. The film is made of five parts, each taken in a single shot of about twenty minutes, which is as long as one reel of film allows. It was shot on thirty five millimetre and shown only in thirty five millimetre prints; the director did not make a digital copy for a long time. It screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2015 and opened in America on 18 March 2016. The matter it treats is being late; the word in the title takes another meaning in every part. The single take method requires the actors to play long scenes without a cut, and in some parts that shows. The dialogue is dense and literary; the characters do not talk like real people. The film uses the shape of noir deliberately and shoots Los Angeles in that tradition. The ending gives the first part a new meaning. Its limit is display; the form pushes itself forward too much, the narrative turns in place at times, and the characters are shallow. Who it is for: viewers who like formal experiment and noir. Who it is not for: the dialogue is affected, the narrative scattered, and the ending cold.