Dead Ends (2023): Where can we go when images lead us to nowhere?

Dead Ends is an appropriate title for Parker Guevarra’s narratively unfulfilling and jaggedly structured portrait of alienated youth. We cut into the middle of conversations between characters with no context and these conversations end just as abruptly as they begin. Characters pop in and out of the narrative with no resolution to the conflict they navigate. Cars are perpetually stagnant in the middle of empty parking lots, never able to complete their journeys into parking spots. With each cut, we hit another dead end, stuck in a state of liminality that refuses progress and forbids closure. We’re always going somewhere, yet we never arrive there. To further confuse the senses, a feeling of time and place can never quite be pinned down. In one stretch near the end of the film, two men talk in a car at night time, one of them in the passenger seat and one of them in the back seat. This is shot from the back seat so that we cannot see anyone from behind the driver’s seat. Guevarra then cuts to the view of a woman sitting in the driver’s seat, her head against the steering wheel, in the day time. It cuts back and forth between these two shots of day and night a few times, disorienting our understanding of the space by using the traditional film grammar of shot-reverse-shot to subversive effect. These people feel like they’re all in the same space, even though they exist at different points in time. Guevarra keeps building upon this unorthodox construction by stacking images on top of each other, and the rigid borders of these opaque images clash against the bottom layer of footage in geometric disarray to further compound the lack of cohesion between every character, every word spoken, and every problem faced. These phrases, “lack of cohesion”, “unfulfilling narrative”, and of course, “dead ends” shouldn’t have a negative connotation. What Guevarra’s experimental form leaves us with is a sense of alienation from time, from space, and from ourselves. As the notes of a melancholy guitar riff begin to play in the final moments of the film, all these fractured images and sounds and dead ends we’ve been led to seem to come together to ask us “Where can we go rom here?”.

Check out more of Parker Guevarra’s work here!