The Aviary, a modest mindfuck of a thriller about two young women fleeing a cult in the New Mexican desert, goes round and round and round in a circle like a snake swallowing itself. A beguiling metaphor, but by the end, you’re left with a self-cannibalized movie. From the first few minutes, the screenplay by first-time feature filmmakers Cullari and Raite is fraught with clunky expository dialogue in which escapees Jillian (Ackerman) and Blair (Izzo) hash over their caged lives in the Skylight sect as they trudge toward freedom … or so they think. Much of this conversation focuses on the seductive control that group leader Seth (an oddly cast Messina) exerted over them during their years at the compound. Fairly quickly, it’s evident that the psychological conditioning these acolytes experienced under his tutelage is not something easily shaken. Seth has burrowed deep inside their brainwashed heads, and his mental presence grows even more dominant as the directionless pair weakens from lack of food and water under a pitiless sun.
Intriguingly enough, the exodus through the desolate terrain plays like a hallucinatory waking dream in which Jillian and Blair increasingly struggle to distinguish reality from paranoia and perhaps insanity. (There’s also a purloined laptop that strangely figures in the narrative.) Indeed, the most pleasurable thing about the movie is that you grapple with the same dilemma, prodded at every turn to speculate about what’s really afoot. Twisted trust exercise? Punishment for defying authority? Elaborate head game? If only the oblique punchline lived up to what begins as an auspicious premise.
There’s a cool DIY quality about The Aviary, which eschews CGI and other FX to convey Jillian and Blair’s deteriorating (or is it simply “deteriorated”?) state of mind. For example, late in the movie, a two-shot frames the talking women as they walk in the midday heat when the camera unexpectedly pans over to Jillian, only to quickly swing back to Blair’s position and reveal Seth as the other conversant, with the trick repeated in vice-versa fashion. It’s a deceptively simple technique, but one with unsettling effect. Ackerman and Izzo hold their own in what is essentially a two-character film, though their portrayals seem interchangeable, likely because the programmed women they play have little sense of individuality. But they and the movie are eventually undermined by an ever-exhausting concept that might have worked better as an hourlong episode in an anthology series. With a little fine-tuning, the ending would have packed a bigger wallop in a truncated version eliminating a coda that only serves to explain the title. But regardless of the length or format, you could easily do without Zac Clark’s monotonic humming score, which annoys more than it communicates tension or dread. It’s the aural equivalent of a gnat buzzing in your ear. Shoo!
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This article appears in April 29 • 2022.
