Gazer Review (Glasgow Film Festival 2025)

Making a debut feature is an impressive feat—it demands immense time and dedication to bring the final product to life, not to mention the financial challenges involved. Creating a film is a monumental achievement worthy of celebration. Gazer marks the feature debut of co-writer and director Ryan J. Sloan, a completely self-financed project that allows his vision to be presented without compromise. While I admire the effort, Gazer ultimately proves to be a tedious film suffering from an identity crisis. It struggles to decide whether it wants to be a Hitchcockian mystery thriller or a psychological horror infused with David Cronenberg’s signature body horror.

We open on Frankie (Ariella Mastroianni), staring into the windows of the apartment buildings across from her job at a gas station. She suffers from dyschronometria, a condition that affects her ability to perceive the passage of time. After zoning out too frequently at work, she is eventually dismissed. As she navigates her daily life, she listens to self-recorded tapes for guidance while attempting to reconnect with her daughter. During a grief support group, she meets a woman (Renee Gagner) who offers her a job to help support her family. However, Frankie is unaware that accepting this opportunity will lead to dark and unforeseen consequences.

Shot on 16mm, Gazer is visually stunning; the grainy texture of the film stock enhances its aesthetic, evoking the feel of a Hitchcockian thriller. The film’s influences are evident, particularly Vertigo, in its use of a medical condition as a central narrative device. However, Gazer fails to effectively convey how dyschronometria impacts Frankie. The film relies on seemingly random time jumps—presumably intended to illustrate her disorientation—but from what little research I’ve done, this isn’t how the condition functions. Losing track of the passage of time is not the same as experiencing abrupt shifts, where one moment it’s daytime, and after a match cut, it’s suddenly night.

Even so, Gazer explores paranoid delusions and Frankie’s flashbacks surrounding her husband’s death. This is where the tone shifts dramatically, veering from psychological thriller into full-on body horror. The transition is abrupt and jarring, occurring mid-film with little buildup. The moment she began pulling a cord out of a cube of meat hidden in a cupboard, I felt as if I had lost track of time—almost as if an entirely different film had begun playing.

Ultimately, Gazer is simply dull. Twenty minutes in, it felt as though an hour had passed, yet nothing had transpired to truly captivate me. I respect the time and effort that went into making this film, but I couldn’t help but wish for a tighter, more engaging narrative instead of the slow slog we ended up with.