“Dig Two Graves”
A
Movie Review
Written by Dan McDonald
I am not observant enough in
watching a movie to write a movie review after seeing the movie only once. I
was seeing the low budget independent film “Dig Two Graves” directed, co-written,
and produced by Hunter Adams for the second time. I bought a ticket and entered
the #2 theater where the movie was showing. I was the first one to take a seat,
but I was a little bit early. I didn’t expect a large audience but was a bit
surprised that no one else came to see the movie. I was an audience of one. I
write this review with a sense of a mission. A movie can be low budget, not a
classic, and yet worthy of our attention. I want to convince you that this is a
movie worth your seeing. I suspect that the movie is almost not available to
see in theaters now, but it is available through Netflix and Redbox. You might
be wondering what it was that made me like this movie. Hey thanks for asking.
We typecast movie genres. “Dig Two
Graves” is described on one sight as “fantasy, horror, mystery.” Mostly it is a
wonderfully told intergenerational human story framed with a dark supernatural
background. This story being told is better than the cheap sensationalism often
associated with such movies described by those genres. I am not going to
describe it as a classic, but as I took this movie in a second time it dawned
on me that Hunter Adams was using hints of dark supernatural forces as a
backdrop to the drama of human beings struggling with their inner temptations;
the temptations that seem taunted by reality until they either consume us or
are conquered enough to move forward in life. Without necessarily defining the
movie as a classic, this is story-telling using a background of the
supernatural in that old way that Shakespeare, and before him the ancient Greek
playwrights employed the supernatural not to draw us away from the humanity of
the story, but to put a spotlight on the frail glory of our weak humanity.
The movie is ambitious. Two dark events
take place at an old rock quarry become a deep water lake. In 1947 two law officers,
a sheriff and a deputy take two bodies to the quarry and dump the corpses into
the deep lake. The deputy (acted by Ted Levine) removes a necklace with a
mysterious medallion from a woman’s body being dumped into the lake. After
dropping the bodies, the deputy threatens the sheriff and lets him know that he
will no longer be sheriff. The sheriff hesitates, tentatively reaching for his
gun but seeing the deputy’s resolve backs down and removes his badge and casts
it into the lake.
Thirty years later, in 1977 a
high-school aged boy and his younger sister ride their bicycles towards the
lake. Older brother Sean wants to jump into the lake from a bluff overlooking
the lake. He wants to convince his sister (Jake, shortened from Jacqueline
played by young Tulsa actress Samantha Isler). While Sean sees the body of
water as a challenge exhilarating to conquer, Jake sees the lake as dangerous.
Sean invites her to take his hand. They will do this together. The younger
sister timidly agrees to jump with her older brother, though obviously not
comfortable with her decision. As Sean begins to run towards the lake, Jake
overcome with her own fears pulls her hand away from Sean’s and Sean leaps
alone from the bluff. Jake walks over to look down into the lake and begins to
yell at Sean that it isn’t funny when he doesn’t show back up on the surface.
As she waits and he doesn’t reappear, she begins to realize something dreadful
has taken place. She runs from the scene and trips hitting her forehead on a
rock when she falls. The rock will leave a scar on her forehead. The event will
also leave a scar in her soul. A sense of survivor’s guilt takes over her life.
Maybe Sean wouldn’t have jumped if she wouldn’t have put her hand into his
agreeing to the jump. Maybe she should have jumped with him.
Thirty years separated the two
events involving a trio of persons whose bodies were lost to the lake. The
remainder of the film will tell a story involving people whose lives were
affected by the two events. The two events, thirty years apart have
interconnected lives, sometimes only on the margins, and sometimes at the very
core of their existence. Jake, after losing Sean to the lake, becomes
withdrawn, grieved, and unable to be consoled.
Then there is a seeming intervention
of the supernatural. Three strangers interrupt her when after school she
walks along a road where a tunnel is formed beneath a railway trestle. The strangers seem to know a
lot about Jake. They tell her that Sean isn’t dead, only lost. He can be brought
back if she does what they tell her. She is wary of the trio. The trio's leader
throws a bag with contents at her feet. They perform some dark mystical power to the bag and its contents. Sean can be brought back but it will cost something. The
lake will only give up a life if a life is cast into to it. Like an
ancient Greek story, the supernatural element works with the aim of possibly undoing someone who has a character flaw that might bring about their destruction. Jake had placed her hand in her brother's hand when she didn't really want to agree to jump with him. The leader of the trio will put his hand out to offer a handshake covenant. Will she shake on a deal she doesn't feel right about? Does she understand that agreements have consequences? Perhaps a girl who is still in her tomboy stage of life shouldn't be faced with such dilemmas, but even if she isn't ready in life to make an adult's decision, she is being confronted with the necessity to make such a decision.
Jake meeting three strangers offering her a way to get her
brother back
Without giving away too much of the
plotline in the movie, one of the most precious parts of the story told in “Dig
Two Graves” is how in her times of trouble, young Jake is able to bond with her
grandfather. She is struggling with her grief, and with the offer of the
strange men. She flees from her parents who seem to her incapable of understanding what she is experiencing. She goes to her
grandfather. He is a sheriff battling his own inner turmoil. When she arrives, he puts down the flask from which he has been drinking and she enters the house. He had survived the Second World War and by 1947 had a job
as a deputy. Jake and her grandfather support each other, though they tend to keep their secret issues hidden. They go
hunting together. Young Jake appears in the movie to be something of a tomboy. She wears hunting boots, guts a deer, and strikes fear into some of the boys her age. Is she up to facing what confronts her? She will need to discover resources to survive what she is facing or her life might be turned into a tragedy. Her grandfather doesn't know everything, but his memories scenes from his life in 1947 gives to him a hint where to start looking if he wants to keep Jake's back.
Tomboy Jake – she chooses to learn hunting, fate chooses to
teach her adulthood.
Two dark stories buried in the lake
hewn from the old quarry are now driving Jake and her grandfather to the
resolutions of their scarred journeys of what they left behind on that bluff
overlooking the lake. Their journeys bond and divide them. They travel together but their focuses differ.
They journey together with their own privately held secrets
I will not tell you how the movie
ends. I will only say that a movie does not need a big budget, or household
name stars, or the latest hot actress to tell a compelling story. I suspect if
you see this movie, you won’t consider it a classic; but I do think most who
see it will think it was something well worth the investment of eighty-five
minutes of their lives, even if nothing is more precious to give than our time.
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