phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2025

Gazer



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 54m
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre Tags: Mystery, Thriller
Plot Summary: Frankie, a young mother with dyschronometria, struggles to perceive time. Using cassette tapes for guidance, she takes a risky job from a mysterious woman to support her family, unaware of the dark consequences that await.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: More of a thriller, but an enjoyable one, until some dream sequences in the back end that are truly nightmarish in Cronenbergian and Lynchian ways. An unreliable narrator like Memento, and the grounded anxiety of Uncut Gems. An excellent example of a great, low budget indie: Every location feels real, every character looks like a real person, not an actor. It's a very lived in world that our main character has difficulty navigating and understands less of than she thinks she does, and the viewer can only go along for the bumpy ride.


Outside Reviews:

Isaac Feldberg
3.5 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

What emerges from this approach in "Gazer," though, is a fractured, sensory puzzle of memory and fear more than a cohesive big picture. That speaks to a certain integrity on the part of its filmmakers, whose efforts to inhabit this unreliable narrator's headspace ultimately plunge the audience into the same type of darkness that she descends through. Suspicions she can't prove, intertwined with anxieties she can't shake and black holes she can't fill, leave Frankie adrift. Inevitably, the film's view of voyeurism sides with conspiracy cinema like "Blow-Up" and "The Conversation" over "Rear Window" — the more she sees, the less she knows, and she senses rather than sees the danger she's most certainly in. The film's horror is gradual and oneiric, like an actual nightmare in that Frankie's dread is matched by her curiosity, and the fragility of her psyche brings forth subconscious bravery as well.


Alex Lei
Grade: C+ - Throwback thriller Gazer is stuck looking backwards

There is certainly talent in front of and behind the camera, although it works more like a demonstration rather than reaching for something more compelling. Gazer shoots the moon for The Conversation but lands closer to Memento, a film that holds itself together with how much fun it can have with its narrative and formal conceit rather than lingering on its thematic implications. Gazer isn't a failure, but it is obligatory—a way to express ability rather than a work of art that exists out of the necessity to express.