DIG TWO GRAVES (2014)

Studio:       Area 23a
Director:    Hunter Adams
Writer:       Hunter Adams, Jeremy Phillips
Producer:  P.J. Fishwick, Claire Connelly, Hunter Adams
Stars:     Samantha Isler, Ted Levine, Troy Ruptash, Danny Goldring, Bradley Grant Smith, Ben Schneider, Gabriel Cain, Dean Evans, Mark Lancaster, Sauda Namir, Ann Sonneville, Kara Zediker

Review Score:

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Summary:

A haunting family history comes to light when a young girl receives a supernatural proposition to bring her brother back from the dead.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

1947 – Sheriff Proctor spies gypsy couple Spresa and Agimi Buchta performing a strange blood ritual with snakes in a backwoods cave. Proctor later visits Spresa at her family’s remote cabin and blackmails her into an arrangement of forced sex in exchange for keeping quiet about the occult activity. Deputy Waterhouse begrudgingly accompanies the sheriff on his illicit activities. During one of his visits to the Buchta home, Proctor retaliates against an unexpected assault by Agimi. While Proctor drowns Agimi in a barrel outside, Waterhouse draws his gun when startled and hastily shoots Spresa. Horrified by his own action, Waterhouse begs Proctor not to shoot the Buchtas’ young son Wyeth, even though the boy witnessed the murders. Before dying, Spresa anoints her son’s face with blood. Proctor and Waterhouse later dispose of the two bodies in the water at the bottom of the quarry. Afterward, Waterhouse pulls his gun on Proctor and demands that he turn over the sheriff’s badge. Proctor does so reluctantly. Waterhouse clutches a talisman taken from the Buchta Family.

1977 – 15-year-old Sean Mather brings his sister Jake, short for Jacqueline, to the quarry to overcome her fear of jumping off the high ledge and into the water. The siblings hold hands to jump in together, but Jake releases her grip just as Sean jumps. Sean is presumed dead from the dive even though his body is never recovered. Jake ends up with a permanent scar on her forehead after falling onto a rock while running for help.

Sometime after the incident, Jake is frustrated to learn that her mother Isabelle is pregnant. Feeling that her beloved brother is being replaced, Jake retreats for solace to the cabin of her grandfather and current sheriff Waterhouse.

At school, Jake sticks up for Willie Proctor, grandson of the former sheriff and a boy who has a crush on Jake, when Willie is bullied in the restroom. When her father is late in picking her up, Jake walks home through an old train tunnel. There, she is met by Wyeth Buchta, now an adult, who is accompanied by his brothers Jon and Dee. Wyeth shows Jake an apparent illusion using a snake in a bag and tells Jake that her brother is not dead, merely hard to find. Jake follows the Buchta brothers back to their cabin and makes a deal with Wyeth to sacrifice Willie’s life in order to bring back her brother Sean.

To explain why she was late coming home, Jake tells her mom, dad, and grandfather about her encounter with the three men. However, when Waterhouse escorts Jake back to the old shack after a tense visit with Proctor and asks Jake to identify Wyeth and his brothers, she remembers her agreement with the Buchtas and refuses to single them out.

While hunting with his granddaughter, Waterhouse informs Jake that Proctor has demanded she not go near Willie. While at a restaurant with her mother, Jake uses the restroom and is visited by Wyeth, who gives her a task to retrieve the talisman taken from his family by Waterhouse. Jake later steals it from a memento box underneath her grandfather’s bed.

Jake joins the Buchtas as they perform a gypsy ritual in the cave. Wyeth bites the head off a snake, anoints Jake with the blood, gives Jake the talisman, and tells her that her brother awaits.

Proctor sees Jake biking away from the scene on his way to visit the Buchta shack. Later, Proctor finds Jake prowling outside Willie’s bedroom and forcibly removes her from his home. However, Wyeth stands in the road to prevent Proctor’s car from passing and Jake uses the opportunity to escape. When Waterhouse sees the blood mark on Jake’s face, he asks what she is up to, but receives no response.

Jake lures Willie to the quarry, but is unable to push him off the edge. Wyeth confronts Jake over her failure afterward and she throws the talisman at him before fleeing.

Wyeth and his brothers confront Isabelle Mather. Immediately, Isabelle collapses and suffers a miscarriage.

Wyeth gives the talisman back to Jake. Waterhouse realizes what is going on when he notices Jake wearing the necklace. Even when Proctor pulls a gun on him, Waterhouse beats Wyeth during their subsequent confrontation and arrests all three Buchta brothers.

The next day, Waterhouse arrives at the station to find Deputy Byron’s throat cut and all three prisoners escaped. Meanwhile, Jake lures Willie back to the quarry for a second murder attempt while Proctor douses the old Buchta shack in alcohol.

Waterhouse arrives at the shack looking for Wyeth and ends up in a gunfight with Proctor. Both men shoot each other just before Wyeth and his brothers arrive to survey the scene. Wyeth gloats over a wounded Waterhouse and boasts that he has successfully persuaded Jake to kill Willie Proctor. Waterhouse protests that murder is not in the girl’s nature as he cuffs Wyeth to himself and uses a cigar to light the building ablaze.

Willie fights off Jake at the quarry. However, Jake realizes that any life can be sacrificed in exchange for her brother’s, so she willingly jumps off the cliff to commit suicide. Submerged underwater, Jake sees her brother swimming towards her. The siblings touch hands before Sean floats away and the talisman sinks to the water’s bottom. Jake begins swimming back towards the surface.

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Review:

Jacqueline “Jake” Mather hasn’t been the same since her idolized brother Sean died.  The inseparable siblings were supposed to jump together into the water below the high quarry ledge, but Jake chickened out at the moment of truth and broke their handhold.  Sean dove, and he never came back up.  Now all Jake has to remember her brother is the watch he left behind and the scar a rock gave her when she ran for her family’s help.

Jake receives an unlikely opportunity to make her spirit whole again when mysterious local gypsy Wyeth Buchta claims he can bring Sean back, provided Jake is willing to sacrifice another life in exchange for her brother’s.  While the unexpected offer weighs heavily on Jake’s conscience, her grandfather Sheriff Waterhouse is forced to confront a skeleton in his own closet.  Because there is a 30-year-old connection between Jake’s family and the gypsies that makes Wyeth’s supernatural proposition potentially more sinister.

Part moody Stephen King-style thriller and part brooding family drama, “Dig Two Graves” takes place in two timelines.  One thread moves forward while the other winds back, with neither sprinting faster than feels natural for the mystery to unfold.  The alternating eras interestingly construct characters in reverse, gradually fleshing flashback details that study who people truly become when dark desires drive actions.

And details are definitely the movie’s strongest suit.  What makes “Dig Two Graves” an astonishing accomplishment for a low-budget indie is the exceptional production value it achieves from deceptively simple shots, props, sounds, and setpieces likely to go unnoticed by many.

Among the ways pennies are stretched into copper wire on a slim budget, “Dig Two Graves” employs an 18-person special effects fire team, an underwater camera unit, and makes its lead actress begin each day in the makeup chair to keep a cut on her forehead when it could just as easily take shortcuts without anyone batting a lash.  This is an impressive independent production unafraid to put in the effort it takes to make each element click, and that commitment is front and center onscreen.

Cameras are mounted on bikes for brief establishing shots.  When a bar of soap hits a kid in the head, it sounds like the thunk of a bar of soap, not a generic Foley sound pulled carelessly from an audio library.  Dollar bills are period to both 1947 and 1977.  The movie doesn’t have to show something like currency at all, but this kind of casually careful attention to every detail makes the setting that much more immersive.

Coldly captivating, but burning beautifully with an authentic Midwestern feel, cinematography is cleverly plotted without being unnecessarily creative.  The camera here is more than a tool simply recording action, and this is not basic master, two-shot, close-up coverage.  “Dig Two Graves” is thought through as a cinematic story, where the medium subtly enhances the telling in virtually every sequence.

Ted Levine is terrific as a grumpy old sheriff bearing a regretful cross muted by alcoholism and masked by grandfatherly affection.  Young Samantha Isler never overplays Jake’s angst, anger, or ennui.  And Troy Ruptash channels a mix of Peter Stormare and Giovanni Ribisi that keeps Wyeth teetering towards weirdly engaging when he could have been bizarrely buffoonish with his top hat and gypsy drawl.

Judged on its own merits, it is difficult to deduct points for anything “Dig Two Graves” can be perceived as doing wrong.  One has to look hard to find fault, and even then it is only discovered in places where it doesn’t matter much to the tale being told.  Jake’s relationship with her father is nearly nonexistent.  There is no clear indication of how Wyeth and his brothers were reared into adulthood following their childhood tragedy.  And viewers of a certain age have the distracting snicker of trying not to see the Buchta brood as some weirdo reincarnation of Larry, Daryl, and Daryl.

Yet what remains critically important to the film’s success is that its direction is decisive, the pacing makes sense, and performances are pointed.  “Dig Two Graves” is a rare genre drama that strays from sentimentality to deliver a suspenseful story executed with powered precision.

Review Score:  90

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