LAKE WINDFALL – The Review

Five longtime buddies go off on an adventure-filled camping trip at a Missouri lake. Things start off fun, but there is soon tension in the air. The men begin to bicker, there’s a gun, and not all will survive to see Monday. If this sounds like a familiar premise done countless times before, you’d be right but I guarantee you’ve never seen anything quite like LAKE WINDFALL, a poorly written but strikingly filmed, capably acted and endearingly odd horror entry from deaf filmmaker Roger Vass that takes a startling, unpredictable turn about halfway through that has to be seen to be believed. With a small cast and an even more minimal amount of dialogue, LAKE WINDFALL drops us smack dab in the middle of a camping vacation gone horribly, horribly wrong. Yet instead of monsters and mediocrity, the film is a thinking deaf man’s bonanza. The fear derives not from cranky critters or killers, but from the deaf community’s desire to be accepted and what that means, or should mean, to the whole of humanity. And the warning is very disturbing indeed.

Three of the five campers in LAKE WINDFALL are deaf (or at least in various stages of hearing impairedness) and the entire film is told in sign language (and subtitles in addition to spoken dialog). On the surface, the plot is rather basic. Drew (Alex Laferriere) is the hearing son of deaf parents and is using the weekend to try to bond with his deaf brother Matt (Christopher B. Corrigan), after his wife has driven a wedge between him and his family (“Your family’s beneath you!” she actually says while sporting lingerie in the film’s opening scene “it’s embarrassing when we’re out in public”). Jake (Jason Hicks) is a deaf friend of the brothers and is introduced having a heated discussion with his mom over a video relay service (VRS) for the deaf on his iPad. Nerdy Cliff (Timothy Dillard) is hard of hearing and is just learning sign language. Keith (Will Sanders) is a friend of Matts who hears just fine but gets quickly annoyed with the others, especially after they teach him to sign his new nickname – ‘penis’. The five drink beer, get on each other’s nerves, and share their feelings about the ups and downs of deafness, getting into a discussion about ‘Audism’ the notion that one is superior based on one’s ability (or inability) to hear. According to this film, it’s most often the “hearing” people who discriminate against the deaf but Audism can occur the other way around.

The first half of LAKE WINDFALL focuses on the interactions between the deaf and the hearing. There are some minor revelations (Matt informs Drew their mother has breast cancer), but the viewer soon begins to wonder where the film is going. The writing in these scenes is unpolished and awkwardly-scripted, as though it were a hastily-written first draft, but the lack of finesse manages to lend the film a disquieting, dreamlike atmosphere. The next morning, Drew and Keith take a boat out to fish, while the others grab Jake’s rifle and shoot some cans. Jake comes across a deer in the woods and decides to shoot it, but just as he is about to pull the trigger, something happens and he and the others are flung to the ground. This is where LAKE WINDFALL takes its extraordinary, unexpected turn. It’s not a machete-wielding killer or an ‘animals attack’ twist that the group encounters, but an apocalyptic, cataclysmic event, later identified as ‘Soundfall’. The world has suddenly become deaf! Disarray and chaos ensue, and as time passes for the protagonists, the sunny, picturesque woodsy setting, flourishing with flora and fauna, gradually becomes darker, moodier and more threatening. We feel the landscape shifting around these men in an unsettling way. The soundtrack on the film is suddenly reduced to a few moody effects and all dialog becomes silent. There are confrontations with others and a couple of murders. Capturing a tangible sense of dread, LAKE WINDFALL (I’m not sure why the film wasn’t titled SOUNDFALL) is infused with sporadic bursts of style under Roger Voss’s capable direction. Much of the voyeuristic camerawork tends to be from the ground up, as though from the point-of-view of lurking critters – so that the wilderness locations, for all their natural beauty, seem to brim with the tension of unbearable foreboding. The cinematography by Ruan De Plessis is crisp and detailed, with much of the atmosphere provided by the locations and cinematography rather than cheap scares. The film ends with the President of the United States explaining the fallout of ‘Soundfall’ and thanking the deaf community for saving the world in a speech so bizarre and artlessly written that it becomes a thing of surreal beauty: “The most disastrous thing that happened to us is that our ears were destroyed…..we could only communicate through the printed word, which was cumbersome…..without sign language, we would still be struggling to get out of the dark ages…..today, we have never seen world peace as much as we are seeing today”. LAKE WINDFALL, which played recently at the St. Louis International Film Festival, is full of these moments that are genuinely beyond any kind of rationalization, lending the film an air of eerie irresolution and I highly recommend seeking it out.

Read my interview (conducted before I had a chance to see the film) with Roger Vass, the writer and director of LAKE WINDFALL HERE
http://www.wearemoviegeeks.com/2013/11/wamg-interview-roger-vass-director-lake-windfall-sliff-2013/