Writer-director Frank Da’s 75-minute premiere of Isaiah’s Phone last month sparked a stir at the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival (May 21-25), leaving critics wondering if this naturalistic docudrama – part abject horror, laced with banter – may offer a new cult classic.
Isaiah (played by Isaiah Brody) lives in a world the generations before him created. He is a teenager with no friends, residing in a dimly-lit Santa Monica apartment with his dad and sister. His life is utterly transformed when his dad decides to give him a phone.
There, he films his life, and creates a world within.
The film proceeds in a naturalistic manner, as if all shot by him. At shots, he flashes his selfie camera before the mirror, or drops his phone, if not covertly holding his phone in his pocket while recording crucial moments of characters and drama only depicted offscreen.
The “found-footage” style, reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project, is difficult to pull off. By default, a series of 20-second and 5-minute clips shot from a moody teenager’s phone in “tall” (iPhone) format would be grating to the viewer.
But Da’s bold choice of style pays off, with sharp editing enabling the damning narrative to unfold between stochastic clips that otherwise transition seamlessly.
It is scarcely possible for the film to invoke the same universal feeling. There will be a barrier, for anyone who remembers life before technology – before iPhones and the widespread use of the internet, before the characteristic flavor of social fragmentation and alienation unique to contemporary life.
Such audiences can hardly imagine a high school experience devoid of social life, let alone contemplate that such circumstances are hardly atypical for the modern adolescent.
Isaiah is initially portrayed as someone that maybe everyone can relate to. He’s excited about a gift. In boredom, he films upbeat scenes of his sister singing in the car. He even has somewhat awkward – and admittedly cringe-worthy – conversations walking along Santa Monica’s Main Street with his dad, who sheepishly suggests that Isaiah should just get friends and “hang out” more like he did as a kid.
Thanks, Dad.
Turns out, making friends isn’t as easy as his dad thinks. (Perhaps like many things.) There’s new ways of making friends now: such as, when you bring your iPhone to school, and start recording everything, maybe a girl will come up to you and ask why you’re recording things. It could be the start of something new.
Sasha, played by Sasha Hibon, provides the fleeting love interest for a day or two while she decides whether to get back with her “toxic ex.”
But when she does, the hilarious Max (Max Vadset) enters the scene, providing an effortlessly-chill role model for Isaiah, unbridled by his short stature. The two bond over smoking weed, playing video games, and watching old movies – nowhere to be found are the parents. In a pivotal moment of internal confusion regarding his sexual orientation, Isaiah catastrophically proceeds in a stuporful course of action quickly followed by consequence and regret.
Where are the parents? Grief and anguish follow Isaiah’s devastating mistake. The depression that had—at the film’s outset—been artfully portrayed in the aesthetic circumstances of his environment returns, this time, to color the expressions of his face. Isaiah sobs to his camera at night, with no one real to talk to.
To his dad, Isaiah has “mental health problems” and the solution is simply to medicate him. From the very outset, the solution provided by his elders — as a means to cope in a world molded before but not for him — is the stack of M|T|W|Th|F|S|S pills lined up for him to pop on the way to school.
Who could predict: the miracle pills didn’t work. Tragically, the life documented here – scene by scene, the one existing inside the screen – ended here, too. The viewer is comforted that none of it is real. But maybe, some of it is.