A Desert (2025)

 

"Filled with Insidious Menace"

Blue Finch are releasing director Joshua Erkman's A DESERT, a film that could sit comfortably alongside Rose Glass's LOVE LIES BLEEDING in the offbeat desert noir genre. 

Alex (Kai Lennox) is a professional photographer famous for 'The Death of the New West', a book of images of abandoned towns and landmarks that are now crumbling and rotting. Hoping to repeat his success he sets off into the desert intending to deliberately lose himself in a maze of ghost towns and lost places that will form the subject of his next book.

Unfortunately he spends the night at a rundown motel where he meets the psychotic Renny (Zachary Ray Sherman) and his 'sister' Susie Q (Ashley Smith). Soon Alex has vanished and his wife Sam (Sarah Lind from A WOUNDED FAWN) employs private investigator Harold (David Yow from UNDER THE SILVER LAKE)  to find him, with ultimately horrific results.

A DESERT could be described as 'slow burn', but that would be by people for whom plot progression is the maxim by which movies should be judged. The film takes its time to allow you to drink in the gorgeous landscapes and the very real ghost towns that are the subject of Alex's obsession, such that we begin to understand his desire to capture them on the very old fashioned camera he lugs round with him. At the same time the film manages to convey a sense of creeping dread pretty much from the outset. The climax is suitably bloody and overall A DESERT is a fine entry in the offbeat desert noir genre.

A DESERT is out on digital from Blue Finch Releasing on Monday 24th November 2025