Automatic at Sea (2016)

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Director: Matthew Lessner

Screenplay: Matthew Lessner

Cast: Breeda Wool as Grace; David Henry Gerson as Peter; Livia Hiselius as Eve; Evan Louison as Miguel; Malia Scharf as Claudia

Synopsis: Swedish emigrant Eve (Livia Hiselius) is invited by an American man named Peter (David Henry Gerson) to a party at his house on a private family island, only for her to be isolated there and one other person, a woman named Grace (Breeda Wool), to appear who warns her of him. Soon reality becomes a fickle thing for Eve from then on.

[Spoilers Throughout]

Automatic at Sea is a curious film. Legitimately off as an experience, by the final thirty minutes this film even took me aback by how peculiar Matthew Lessner's creation is, subjective in its punctures of oddness next to tropes carried on from a known sub genre of unconventional cinema. The film willingly sticks its head through the open window of absurdity when you presume it to be a follow-on in the history of subjective reality stories of a woman whose psychological stability is to question, not taking a risk of getting stuck in said metaphorical window and coming off as pretentious and/or silly, but feeling like a unique take which is as much a pastiche of those films as it is its own version. Whilst many of these films from this sub-genre are masterpieces - from Bergman's Persona (1966) to Polanski's Repulsion (1965) - it's unfortunate almost all of them are directed by men. Obviously Automatic at Sea is a film made by a man, and it has no direct feminist critique of the material, but when it leads to Eve literally as her own spectator, and slips into deliberately absurd and bizarre moments like nocturnal secret food eating, Lessner to his credit is prodding the potentially gender imbalance subject with a healthy disregard. The entire film is closer to the tip of parody, both deliberately but also to a dangerous degree where it'll lose its impact, but succeeds in the stunt immensely.

It was the moment David Henry Gerson, already playing the character of Peter as a very charismatic but creepy individual, softly spoken but effectively trapping the protagonist Eve  on his personal island, cosplays as Torgo from Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) whilst mowing the lawn, the kind of moment even when he's already been behaving weirdly as a character even as a diehard connoisseur of strange cinema like myself had to sit back and be amazed I could still be dumbfounded by moments like this in films. It feels deliberate throughout that, as part of Lessner's tone, he's including such moments, and that sense of silliness is as much a unique attribute to Automatic at Sea and why it succeeds. Credit has to go to the cast for being able to pull this off, especially Gerson who has to commit to all the strangest moments, his character the figure who personifies the madness within the island. Starting off as a potential sociopath in a realistically paced story, his performance matches the tonal shift of the product where he bends to the film's stranger moments, talking to his mother when there's no one in the chair the other side of the table, or going into his barn and masturbating against a peddle bicycle, which I am amazed I am even typing as a sentence...suffice to say, you don't start Automatic at Sea believing any of this would happen, feeling like a standard high quality 2010s mindbender, only to eventually dance around with bizarre moments it somehow gets away with.

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Patience to get to this final act becomes part of the story as, trapped on the island with Peter, constantly promising guests will eventually arrive, Eve is bored out of her mind with only board games to occupy herself until Grace appears, cuddling up to Peter but openly warning Eve of him. The film plays with this sense of waiting and tedium with its long take scenes, slowly moving along until many of the events chronicled before appear, at first with a sense of dread but many of them as shown having an inherently absurd quality to them This proves true - even in the subjective tone of the world, that her own psychological state is being undermined, it comes obvious to Eve and the viewer in one scene that Peter is a literal Satyr-like trickster who will appear and disappear if need be, forcing her to live in his world as a bored captive who cannot be escaped. Why he does so is never explained but this itself becomes part of another aspect of Automatic at Sea about questioning its own tropes, where as Eve scrutinises her own view of the events that transpire, she eventually to escape the bonds on the island has to literally look at herself, a perplexing journey that is found within a distinct aesthetic.

Bookmarked in chapters whose intertitles are a cross between woodland animal drawings and Hygge, Automatic at Sea at least stands out from similar films from the get-go. The synth score, by Jeff Witscher, is similar audibly to many others of its ilk but rarely do these scores feel tiresome; whilst there is a danger of them becoming tedious, the modern synth boom in music scores is as much because its appropriately atmospheric for a film like Automatic at Sea, evoking the lingering sense of strangeness that builds throughout. Even with the likelihood the synthesizer nostalgia will eventually reach a breaking point and stopped being used, Witscher's score is a dreamy electronic one which will win you over anyway. The sense of eccentricity is pervasive even in contrasting the naturalistic style of the film with its moments of tweeness in the chapter titles and weirdness in the plot. Alongside the elliptical editing and plotting, events like secret toast eating out of context but part of the world, it adds a great deal to the curious experience of Automatic at Sea.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Elliptical/Mindbender/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Personal Opinion:

Much more a slow burn little gem, a curiosity that for me could only be made in the 2010s despite visibly taking inspiration from similar films of yore - much of this because, without becoming ironic in the slightest, Matthew Lessner's film feels like a comment on this entire story trope and succeeds as a result.

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