Review by Sue Finn
Directed by: Joe Badon
Starring: Linnea Gregg, Collin Galyean, Dorian Rush, Joseph Estrade, Rhonda Laizer
Before the credits have even had a chance to appear on your screen, disparate images are splashed across it, giving a clear indication of the psychedelic mind-fuck this film intends to be.
The young and winsome main girl, Elizia (Linnea Gregg), walks down a street into a café where all other patrons are viewed in tableau, as if their stories have stopped for hers.
The Jesus-like man sitting before her is apparently her boyfriend, Fred (Joseph Estrade), and he has chosen this spot to break up with her. His ‘goodbye’ is a confusing rant; his flowery exposition littered with "lizard people" and "Greater Callings." He talks about finding a gateway to the "inner ear."
She trudges home to a cacophony of offensive jazz.
A phone call interrupts her bed-moping and sends a signal to her vulnerable brain causing a type of seizure. Another call leads her to sharing her broken love story with a telemarketer, how Fred began their relationship as her "perfect boyfriend" but then he started "being distant and eating kale!" Lol!
The man on the phone is strangely supportive and interested in her situation, he tells her to call him "The Telemarketer."
Back at work under threat of firing should she miss another day, a friend comes into the perfume shop to ask her out but she declines; an oddly comedic customer comes in requesting help with perfume that smells like rotten meat or over-ripe bananas.
Suddenly home, she is shocked to hear ‘God’ in her inner ear and tells her unbelieving friends about it before finding herself tormented by both The Telemarketer and "voices." "I’m broken," she continually tells people.
Seeking medical advice, she is disheartened when her doctor finds that hypnotising doesn't work (as a cure for ear bleeding and hearing voices? Hmmm ok) and refers her to a "Homeopathic Holistic Psychiatrist."
While randomly eating her sandwich in the woods, Elizia is visited by a little girl who tells her to throw away the crusts on her sandwich as "we are all just children even when we die"; and the girl then does an odd interpretative dance that I'm assuming the filmmaker believes is whimsical and embracing of childlike qualities, but it is so clearly an orchestrated moment that it robs it of any power it may have held had the child in question been allowed to just muck about the way kids actually do.
After a bad trip with friends, Elizia retreats back home to drown her sorrows in brownies, but instead decides to inexplicably murder the neighbours' dog after he talks to her (yes really - it's actually kinda cute and well done until the death ruins the sweetness).
I'm assuming the director doesn't want us to actually like this character, as killing an animal is right up there with the best ways to alienate an audience.
After this, things go into an overdrive of crazy dreams, visions, kidnappings, bad dates, and general freakiness that for me never resolves into any kind of satisfying conclusion.
At its closure, there are more questions than answers, and a general sense of having wasted time watching pretty pictures that in the end mean nothing.
Though I didn’t particularly enjoy this film, director Joe Badon is to be commended for his achievement. It's remarkable to think this was made for only $8000; the impressive quality in both the look and sound of the film and some of the more artistic cinematography is simply lovely.
On the less positive side, it's overlong, dialogue is stilted and deliberately obscure, characters impossible to relate or connect with, and acting wooden. The background music is either old-fashioned organ sounds or jazz - both of which hold no actual tune and I’m presuming are there to help the viewer feel uncomfortable and unsettled.
Though her face is captivating and she certainly throws herself into this role boots and all, Gregg’s acting when wanting to show her "brokenness" consists of looking wall-eyed and uninvolved, which didn’t really work for me; I want to see more of the internal nothingness a devastating break-up causes.
For me, obscure narratives that don't hang together to make a coherent story feel wasteful and impossible to motivate myself to devote attention to. It’s a shame, but hopefully with his obvious talent, the next film writer/director Badon makes will have a clearer vision, as The God Inside My Ear refuses to give you any way into this 'story' which ultimately seems pointless.
