A remarkable self-made film that is as witty and intelligent as it is unnervingly creepy, Disquiet is an all-too-uncommon example of what was once the vision at the dawn of the digital video age -- that any potential filmmaker with talent and desire could grab a camera, corral a few friends, and create a masterpiece.
Writing, directing, acting, editing, supplying the props, the locations, and so on, Disquiet's creator, Matthew Doyle, demonstrates an exceptional ability to sustain the intellectual values of a larger-budgeted feature through his deft imagination and jovial will power. For once, and it rarely happens with credit card-funded movies, the viewer is challenged by the emotional constructs of the narrative, rather than by the compromises of the production environment.
As for the 67 minute feature, you might wish Doyle had had the resources to embellish the beginning, but the plot is astutely shuffled to engage the viewer throughout, as it gradually reveals the inner desires of several different characters, culminating in the film's stunning finale, a tour de force piece of acting and directing that will disturb your sense of security forever after.
- Douglas Pratt
Douglas Pratt is a regular columnist for Rolling Stone, author of Doug Pratt's DVD-Video Guide (2000), and the recently published Doug Pratt's DVD.
--------------------------------------------------------
Darren Prager is an aspiring writer who finds himself completely unable to comprehend the intricacies of human behavior. Obsessed with finding the key to understanding the nature of character, he turns a co-worker's family into the unwitting subjects of his new project. Darren's own humanity is soon put to the test when he goes beyond observational research to the realm of gross violation.
CAST
Darren - David Tuchman
Mason - Matthew Doyle
Brandon - Brandon Slagle
Alicia - Niki Notarile
Holden - David Hilfstein
Tim - Mike Keller
Sales Manager - Peter Stoehr
Margaret - Melanie DiPiero
Lifeguard - Filip Petrovic
Beautiful Woman - Gisele Torres
We love to observe others surreptitiously, to see how they behave when they think nobody is watching. We want to learn their secrets; little tid-bits we could never know otherwise.
Nobody wants their privacy violated, yet most of us violate the privacy of others all the time. Which of us hasn’t looked inside somebody else’s medicine cabinet, put an ear to the wall to hear what was being said in the next apartment or watched somebody through an open window? We love to delve beneath the surface, to remove the public mask folks put on for the world. Doing so provides us with an strange level of intimacy with those we observe - and what we don't know about them, we create within our imaginations.
But what if your imagination is faulty? What if you cannot fathom what people do when they come home from work at night? What if it was a struggle for you to comprehend the most basic human interaction? What if you've spent so much time alone that your personality has begun to dissolve like sugar in a hot cup of coffee?
----------------------------------------------------------
Folks always want to know what the movie is about, which I find more than a little frustrating - especially when asked to provide a three or five line synopsis like the one above. 'Disquiet' isn't a movie that's about things; 'Disquiet' is a movie that speaks of things. It speaks of loneliness, self hatred, dorkyness and the desire to get out of one's skin. If 'Disquiet' is about anything, it is the nature of character itself.
The title 'Disquiet' comes from Fernando Pessoa's major prose piece, The Book of Disquiet. Written in the form of a diary, it is considered by many to be one of the great literary works of the 20th Century. While the story-line in my script has almost nothing to do with The Book of Disquiet, the movie's protagonist, Darren Prager, and Pessoa himself have a lot in common; both could be labeled as objective introverts.
The true inspiration for the story came from the Pessoa poem that I quoted in the script, I Am The Escaped One:
I am the escaped one,
After I was born
They locked me up inside me
But I left.
My soul seeks me,
Through hills and valley,
I hope my soul
Never finds me.
Time is money - and the production of 'Disquiet' lacked both. The movie was shot over six extremely intense days in July of 2006. The effort of the cast and crew was nothing short of heroic. Everybody carried equipment, held the mic boom and drove the production vehicles.
I'm extremely proud of the end result.
Matthew Doyle
Writer-director
