The Quarry (2020)

(On Cable TV, February 2022) I waited a very long time for The Quarry to become interesting, and the best I got was a brief blip of entertainment in the fourth-fifth of the film, right before it disintegrated again. Much of the film’s limitations, I suspect, come from a basic mishandling of tone. What could and should have been a tight straightforward modern-western thriller is executed as a ponderous tragedy bordering on homeopathic horror:  The low droning soundtrack, oblique cinematography, dark sets, slow pace and pseudo-gritty visual design all suck any energy out of the film even when it should be visceral and fascinating. I did like Michael Shannon’s performance as a local sheriff trying to get at the bottom of a mysterious murder, and the ironic cat-and-mouse game between him and the guilty party. The finest moments of the film come when the sheriff is clearly sensing something wrong and turning around the answer without necessarily knowing what it is… while the murderer is stuck in his lies and almost goaded by circumstances to confess. Alas, the conclusion wants to try something different and stick the landing of what the final moments could have been. The result is something that had a spark of potential extinguished by mishandled execution. Too much of a bore for an evening’s worth of crime-thriller entertainment—pick something else, because The Quarry is almost designed to annoy you.