Nighstream: Landlocked (2021)

Nightstream Screening: LANDLOCKED (2021)

Dir. Paul Owens

A montage of home movie footage from the late eighties through the nineties opens Paul Owens’ Landlocked. A man narrates to his sons that when he dies, their childhood home will be torn down within a year of his passing. He asks his sons to pack up what they want as the rest will be hauled away. He ends his recording with, “You made my life great.”

Mason, one of the three sons, returns to the home nearly a year later to assess the items left in the house. Eventually he finds an old Panasonic SVHS camcorder tucked away in a hidden closet. Not only does the camcorder work, but it provides its user the ability to view any moment from the past. You just set the date and time, point it in any area, and you’ll see what a camera would have seen in that moment.

Armed with an all-seeing camcorder and a box of blank VHS tapes, Mason begins to chronicle his memories. He becomes obsessed with collecting images from his past. He watches himself and his brother’s playing soccer with their dad. He watches them playing in a clubhouse and swimming in the pond. These memories represent everything he desperately clings to, but ultimately how can you move on if you’re only looking back? Mason sinks into this obsession and the past and present collapse around him.

Coming up on the one-year anniversary of my father’s death, Landlocked broadsided me. Within the constraints of a genre narrative was a heart-felt meditation of grief. I, like Mason, will be seeking the comfort of old home movies. A birthday party from 1988, my first short documentary about teens in my hometown, or camping in the Shawnee forest with my dad, these VHS’s I cherish. Viewing these is reaching for a glimpse of that naïve happiness only found in childhood. It is trying to relate to the ghosts caught within those fuzzy images. While Mason has a tough time emoting, there are moments too heavy for him to burden. It is in these instances the project transcends itself.

What can you do with your father’s collection of home movies? Well, if your Paul Owens, you take your dad’s footage, build a narrative around it, and let your brothers interact with the past and present. Mason, Paul, Seth, and Jeffrey Owens make up the heart of this ultimate DIY project. By looking at the credits, the entire Owens family pitched in to make Paul’s dream a reality. You feel the passion throughout the film. I was mesmerized by the ingenuity of cross-cutting between the VHS footage from the past and today’s digital footage. When I caught on, I thought it was going to feel gimmicky or get old after a while, but it didn’t. Splicing the past with present was a highly effective tool in telling this story about loss.

If this is what Paul Owens can do with a relatively no-budget film, I’m more than excited to see the follow up film. As a sidenote, I rocked out to “Half Moon,” by Diners, a superb track that fit the scene well.