Next time you watch a movie, you should clock how much time passes before you expect someone to a) whip out a machine gun, b) have gratuitous sex, or c) get offed. Hollywood’s tossing that stuff at us within minutes—seconds, even—of the opening credits, and after attending a private screening of Rick Alverson’s The Builder, I realized that I’m in need of therapy. It’s not the violence. It’s the ridiculous pace/emotional string-pulling/cheesy soundtracks of the movies I’ve been watching.
I actually found my mind resisting the focused, meditative beauty of Alverson’s film at first; it took a few minutes to shed that weird need for speed and follow a man, a builder, through his morning contemplation. The Builder is a photographer’s movie: the density of poignant, plaintive shots is almost overwhelming, each one conveying a deep pool of information that the mind can plunge into or just let be. Those deep pools throw a lot back at the viewer, too, opening up a space in which to ponder one’s own satisfaction with life, bringing up subconscious questions about work and meaning. Lead actor (and co-writer) Colm O’Leary makes his way from Queens to the Catskills to Richmond, finding ever-widening gaps between his conceptual reality and actual reality, drawing the audience into his existential events with his mastery of facial expression (and his excellent beard… this is Richmond, after all). Occasional calm, resonating tones make a perfect and non-invasive soundtrack, and some of the music is done by Alverson’s band, Spokane.

An open-ended, organic scripting style allowed the actors to “respond to the environment,” imparting a very magnetic, real-life quality to the film. “This type of production is meant to be small, intimate, local—I cast people who I know, whose personalities I understand, so that I can recontextualize them in the film,” he notes. “I really don’t want to project a worldview. I find that reprehensible, arrogant. A film should be much more communal, something captured that we’re looking at together. It was enriching to observe the development, find out things about characters through the course of the film…by letting that elasticity exist, the scenes felt much more alive and real.”

Alverson directed, co-produced, co-wrote, shot and edited the thing himself, on a tiny budget, and plans to make a film a year here in Richmond (perhaps shedding one or two of those responsibilities in the process). He’s also a carpenter, clearly a source of inspiration for The Builder. “I spent a year building a house, an experience that informed the temperament of the film and my ideas about failure and ambition… there’s an integrity, a concrete sense of craft and physics that exists in carpentry, but those things are more pliable in filmmaking…rather than accepting that films tell a story a certain way, I started to ask myself, ‘What can I get rid of? What is standing in the way of communicating an actuality to people?’”

He’ll be screening The Builder at festivals throughout the year; you can watch the trailer and find out more at thebuilderfilm.com.