2024 Protanopia

• Directed by: Matthew Mahler
• Written by: Matthew Mahler
• Stars: Timothy J. Cox, Anthony Carey, Paula Maher
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 15 Minutes
• Trailer: https://vimeo.com/929606406

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

When a young woman goes missing, her brother has dreams about the house where Alan Roscoe Jr lives. And things aren’t at all normal with Alan or his house. It’s interestingly loaded with trippy visuals, bright colors, dreamlike sequences, camera tricks, and general weirdness. It’s thin on story, but still an interesting watch. We both give it a thumbs up overall.

Spoilery Synopsis

We open on a Bible lesson talking about a leprous house, and then credits roll.

A woman runs through the fog and opens a door; then she’s hit with a hammer, and someone starts putting up “Missing” posters about her.

A detective interviews Luke about the missing girl, his half-sister. Elsewhere, we see Alan, who kills an animal with his lawn mower and feeds the remains to someone in his basement. He obsessively cleans his house.

Alan bakes a pie and lets his guests in, but Janice also brings a pie, which throws off his routine. This is the neighborhood group, and they all have a prayer for Alan’s dead father. The meeting doesn’t go as Alan expects, so he’s not happy about that; Janice seems to be making a power play. They all eat her pie and not his.

Luke and Jack talk about his writing, which is hard since Mallory went missing. Luke then has a very weird vision.

Alan hears someone downstairs and grabs a shotgun. He goes down and finds the ghost of his dead father there, and the old man isn’t happy. He warns Alan to move the bones before he gets caught. He goes outside, digs up something, and his hallucinations just get more and more wild.

Naturally, Janice shows up in the middle of all this to retrieve her pie plate. He leads her to the basement and something happens.

Luke shows up at Alan’s house and looks around. He’s followed his visions of Mallory– but first, a song! Once he wakes up, Jack is still there, reading his book of dreams, but Luke explains that they aren’t his poems, someone is putting them there.

There’s a search for the missing girl, and Alan participates. Everyone wonders where Janice is, but no one really likes her. When he gets home after, he sees his father again.

The detective searches Alan’s backyard and finds bones. The detective and Luke wander around the foggy forest at night. They both head to Alan’s house and check out the basement. Alan calls Luke, “Jack.” The detective bursts in and shoots Alan, who turns into flowers. The detective also calls Luke “Jack.” Jack points at the detective and turns him into dirt.

As the poem said, there really is a lot of dirt in that house…

Luke, who is now Jim, lets in the neighborhood group for another meeting.

Brian’s Commentary

Wikipedia: Protanopia is a severe form of red-green color blindness caused by the complete absence of long-wavelength sensitive (L-cones) in the eye, commonly known as red blindness. People with this condition cannot detect red light, making them dichromats who only see in shades of blue, yellow, and beige.

When the screen goes red, Alan is really crazy.

Janice totally had it coming.

There are lots of weird visuals, colors, and camera tricks in this one. The music adds a lot to the experience as well. Kevin said toward the end, “There’s a story in there somewhere,” and that’s the main impression I got as well. This is visually very neat, but there’s not much plot to it.

Kevin’s Commentary

There is totally nothing wrong with having two pies at a gathering.

This one is all about the visuals and audio, which are excellent and kept me interested. The story, not so much – we have to hunt for that.

I was drawn to the screen and never bored, but would have enjoyed more of a straightforward story. I certainly liked it more than disliked it.