AllMovie

Writer-director Ronald Bronstein, who makes his feature debut with Frownland, and his wife, Mary Bronstein, who plays a supporting role in the film, have a connection to the nebulous mumblecore movement, having starred together in Joe Swanberg's web series, Butterknife. But it would be a mistake to call Frownland "mumblecore." Sure, Keith (Dore Mann) does more than his share of mumbling, but the film itself is more of a prolonged anguished yowl than a mumble. Composing a vividly etched, bleakly comic urban nightmare in grainy 16 mm, Bronstein initially presents Keith and his grim subsistence lifestyle in such a way that it's hard not to agree with his snarky roommate, Charles (the brilliantly deadpan Paul Grimstad), who cruelly berates Keith, summing him up as "a burbling troll in his underwear." Through Mann's discomfitingly raw and empathetic performance, we come to a kind of understanding of Keith that renders his plight genuinely harrowing. Bronstein demonstrates not just talent and passion but tremendous canniness as a filmmaker, including an extended comic sequence in which Charles applies for a job at a standardized test prep company, and meets another pathetically overeducated and cynical New Yorker (Paul Grant), who seems to see him with a disdain comparable to that with which Charles sees Keith, before hilariously revealing his own essential hopelessness. That sequence serves as a necessary intermission of sorts, making Keith's inexorable downward spiral more bearable to witness. Frownland will certainly not be to everyone's taste, but for those who can stomach it, it's a powerfully raw, unfiltered vision of insurmountable alienation and urban squalor. The film's unique emotional palette and its startling and laudable lack of compromise make it a must-see for more adventurous filmgoers.