Single Shot, A (2013) [Blu-ray]
Crime | Drama | Thriller

Tagline: One Mistake

One mistake. One secret. One chance. When John Moon (Sam Rockwell) accidentally shoots a young woman and discovers a box full of cash, the isolated hunter becomes the hunted. His struggle to conceal both the death and the money triggers a dangerous chain reaction of event, ultimately escalating into a battle for survival.

Storyline: The tragic death of a beautiful young girl starts a tense and atmospheric game of cat and mouse between hunter John Moon and the hardened backwater criminals out for his blood.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman on February 21, 2014 -- Like a lot of guys who were raised in the semi-wild west, it was a big day when I got my first rifle when I was a relatively young boy. My Dad used to take me out target shooting and spent quite a bit of time trying to train me to shoot right handed, despite the fact that I am resolutely a leftie (ironically, my Dad was, too, but had learned to shoot right handed, especially after his left arm was severely wounded in World War II). He insisted that I'd be able to expel shells and reload faster as a right handed shooter, but I just could not master aiming and firing without my dominant arm and hand in play. There's a chilling scene near the end of A Single Shot, a low key but often harrowing drama set in an amorphous backwoods town full of various lowlifes, when John Moon (Sam Rockwell) probably wished he had learned to aim and shoot with his left hand. A Single Shot may remind some of Winter's Bone and Deliverance in its depiction of a rural lifestyle that involves some very scary people and various illegal activities. There's nary a moral center in the entire film, save for perhaps a couple of tangential supporting characters. Moon himself is shown to be of questionable ethics from virtually the first sequence. Not only does he shoot a woman in the woods (which is admittedly a tragic mistake) during a hunting expedition, he wastes no time in trying to hide the crime, in the process of which he discovers a huge stash of cash which evidently belonged to the woman, at which point he just decides he might as well take that for all his "hard work". A bit later it turns out that even his hunting is illegal—John has several arrests for poaching on conservancy land. Obviously, this is not going to be a traditional hero a typical audience will be able to root for.

Quite a bit of A Single Shot plays out without a single word of dialogue. There are instead long (and sometimes uninterrupted) shots of John tooling about on the vast acreage surrounding his isolated mobile home, which is itself a kind of ramshackle affair which has definitely seen better days. After the opening sequence (which plays out with little more than a gasp of shock and some strained breathing), John deals with the body, finds the cash and then pretty much just returns to his routine. It's only much later that the film finally begins to peel back the layers of this particular onion, showing a man down on his luck, a guy who had worked his family's farm for all of his life until his father lost the farm to foreclosure. John has had a series of short term jobs since then, failing at most of them because they keep him cooped up inside, and he's only recently become estranged from his wife Moira (Kelly Reilly) and toddler son Nolan.

John sees the windfall of cash as a saving grace delivered by some previously hidden deity, and he hopes to achieve a rapprochement with Moira, though she does not seem very interested in that prospect. In the meantime, John's buddy Simon (Jeffrey Wright) returns to town and urges John to see the local attorney Pitt (William H. Macy) in order to deal with Moira's divorce petition. John does go to see Pitt, asking him to delay the proceedings for as long as possible. Pitt is understandably intrigued when John plops a huge wad of cash on the desk as a down payment.

Within just a day or two, however, John's panicked plans for his future life start to fall apart when he receives a series of threatening phone calls (as well as a brick through his trailer window) that alerts him to the fact that the money's rightful owners either know or have guessed that John is in possession of it. A dangerous cat and mouse game ensues, with John slowly becoming aware he's in the midst of a much larger, intertwined story where he has virtually no allies and has to decide how to ford his way through increasingly treacherous waters.

Rockwell does outstanding work in a role which has very little dialogue and where the actor must offer his portrayal mostly through action and reaction. Macy is a bit hammy here, adopting a physical disability for no real reason other than that it makes Pitt even more unusual than he would have been anyway. The supporting cast is filled with both understated (Reilly) and fairly hyperbolic (Joe Anderson as a backwoods ex-con) turns that add immeasurably to the film's ambience.

Writer Matthew F. Jones pares this story down to its barest essence, delivering a sense of increasing paranoia and stricture. But it's director David M. Rosenthal who makes A Single Shot the viscerally memorable experience it is. Rosenthal isn't necessarily subtle with his subtext of the hunter and the hunted, but he offers a moody, dour yet incredibly picturesque tour of a rugged world where a gun determines who lives and who dies—sometimes. The film's chilling final moments prove that sometimes wildlife can survive while men end up ensnared in a deadly web of their own making.

A Single Shot is a really interesting, ultimately devastating, film that is unique in a number of ways, including long patches without a word of dialogue and a really claustrophobic ambience that hangs over the proceedings like the ubiquitous clouds covering the woods throughout the film. Rockwell does really good work here, showing a conflicted soul who wants to right his life but isn't capable of doing so without making a series of really bad decisions. While this Blu-ray reproduces an organic looking film experience, it's resolutely dark, making it at times virtually impossible to make out what's going on. Still, A Single Shot comes Recommended.

[CSW] -2.1- I'm all for slow developing thrillers, but this one really takes it too far. Even though every actor tried their best and the novel that this was based on was probably great, without the insight that a novel can give as to that each person is thinking causes this movie lose all focus. It just seemed to drag on and on. If it's cat & mouse then it must be one hell of a slow cat because nothing of note really happens until about an hour in, and even then it doesn't pick up. The story itself would have been a good one if you knew each character was thinking, but without that it was just played out to slowly without appearing to going anywhere. You begin to feel that the main character was a bit stupid and that he would wake up and do something exciting at any moment, but that moment never came. Unfortunately for me this turned out to be a dreadful waste of time.
[V4.0-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.


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