'The A-Frame' (2024) Movie Review

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. So goes the well-worn saying, so goes the story of Donna (Dana Namerode). A talented pianist, the diagnosis of an aggressive, highly localized cancer means the only way to save her life is to amputate her arm. As her days become a series of indifferent doctors and callous support groups, the prospect of losing everything she’s devoted her life to leads her to accept an offer from Sam (Johnny Whitworth, Empire Records), a mysterious (sketchy) scientist who claims he can cure her. What initially looks like an immediate, miraculous cure turns into something much more sinister. And occasionally quite gooey.

 

In The A-Frame, writer/director Calvin Lee Reeder (The Oregonian) takes the viewer through parallel universes via a miniature artificial black hole, dives into the ethics of scientific research, examines how far we will go to maintain the status quo, and picks at the ideas of the great cost of pushing scientific boundaries. He also spews a liquified dude from one end of a manmade interdimensional vortex. I said it was gooey. (Actually, goopy might be a better description, it’s…chunky.)

 

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The film offers all of this philosophical and moral excavation wrapped up in a lo-fi hybrid of science fiction and body horror. Reeder and company do a lot with relatively little, setting Sam up in the type of seedy, out-of-the-way warehouse a less-than-legitimate researcher might hang his shingle. His machine, the eponymous A-frame, looks ragged and cobbled together, again, like the work of a lunatic with poor overhead lighting and limited resources. Instead of big-dollar digital effects, they employ unusual editing flourishes and camera techniques to create trippy visuals and lend an esoteric air to the proceedings.

Whitworth gleefully chomps on his lines. He’s charming and personable in his early entreaties to Sam—otherwise, even her desperation wouldn’t be enough to get her into a beat up cargo van with an obvious wingnut for a trip to a ramshackle laboratory at the end of a dark street—but when the creepy weirdo in fact turns out to be a creepy weirdo, no one should be surprised. And he has a total blast doing it. Namerode, on the other hand, is a bit of a stumbling block, with a generally flat performance throughout—though her reactions to the periodic sudden blood geysers is on point.

 

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The world building in the script works best when Reeder leaves it vague and oblique. Like so many films that center on tech and technological advancement, the more specific Sam tries to be, the deeper he gets into the nitty gritty scientific minutia of how his device works, the more rickety it sounds. Fortunately, the film pulls back before wandering too far afield.

 

The A-Frame takes some big, wild swings, and though they don’t always connect, it’s a compelling watch and there’s a lot to recommend. Off-kilter and funny, this is an ambitious cinematic vision, weird body horror about the lengths we go to in order to survive that roots around in murky philosophical mire

 

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