[FrightFest 2020 Review] Blinders is About the Perils of Human Connection

Moving to a new town can be terrifying, especially when you’re moving from a home town to the big city of LA. Sure, there’s the excitement of meeting new people and that ol’ American grit of staking out on your own...but there’s also the crushing loneliness of being an insignificant person in a very large ocean of uncaring people. So when you find that connection, that one or two people who seem to get it and cut through the rabble of blase indifference, you just have to hang on for dear life. 

In Blinders, Andy (Vincent Van Horn) understands this completely. After a very messy relationship imploded on him in Texas, he had no choice but to try to start anew. Selling his drum kit and packing up his meager belongings, he and his dog Juicebox move to the big city of Los Angeles. After moving in, he still finds himself pining over his previous girlfriend, scrolling through her Instagram feed in bed, obsessing over what was. So he decides to look up dive bars and ends up at The Rooster where he meets a woman named Sam (Christine Ko). 

She was just stood-up and Andy, seeing a chance to make a human connection, asks to buy her a beer which leads to them chatting in a booth. Andy tells her about his previous relationship and how he thought everything was going well until he found her in bed with the gym teacher at the school they both taught at. Andy and Sam have instant chemistry and after asking if he’d like to get out of here, she calls a RYDE driver to take them to her home, where they drink beers and cuddle and it’s super nice. 

The next day, while Andy is buying a coffee with his dog, he runs into the RYDE driver from the night before, who introduces himself as Roger (Michael Lee Joplin). After chatting a bit, Roger asks if he can have Andy’s number to maybe go get a beer sometime because, “it’s nice to have a genuine person to talk to in LA.” This feeling of loneliness and the desire for human connection is driven home when Andy FaceTimes his Texan friend Colton (Chase Joliet) to tell him about the woman he’s crushing on. Colton is caught up in his own world and doesn’t seem to care at all about Roger, now that he’s thousands of miles away. So Andy goes to get a drink with Roger and while Roger is a little odd, he actually listens to Andy. He allows him to vent and commiserates. Before the night is over, Roger tells him, “it’s just so easy to lie. Straight shooters like you and me...we’re a rare bird.”

But as Andy tries to nurture a burgeoning relationship with Sam, Roger becomes incessantly obsessed with Andy, blowing up his phone with texts. It escalates as Roger follows Andy on a walk with Sam, calling Andy to catch him in a lie. And when Andy blows him off and then ghosts him, Roger’s obsession turns dangerous. 

For most of the runtime Blinders feels like a standard paranoid thriller. Andy is a typical, unlucky protagonist who looks for a human connection in a city that doesn’t care about him and ends up finding the wrong kind of connection. Where the more he tries to extricate from his situation, Roger becomes more and more attached. The script by Dash Hawkins and Tyler Savage (also the director) runs through the gamut of standard tropes as Roger finds ways to get into Andy’s apartment to set up cameras, sends compromising photos and basically does everything in his power to make Andy’s life miserable. It works if only because of the budding relationship between Andy and Sam. Their chemistry is strong and you want to see them thrive. And besides Andy didn’t really do anything terrible to Roger. 

As someone who did have an unfortunate situation with a person I thought was a friend, some of the events that happened in Blinders took on a different kind intensity than it might for others. And Tyler and Dash are able to wring every bit of tension out of a slight premise by showing just how out of control the situation is and how hard it is to find safety when you’ve been violated the way Andy has been. From the cops writing it off as a “domestic dispute” to the blame-the-victim route of saying, “You probably antagonized him,” Andy has nowhere to turn. 

What I found most fascinating about Blinders is how the film is able to put the blinders on the viewer for most of the film. In between the genre tropes and the annoying stalker we’ve seen countless times, the film also manages to pull the rug out a few times by subverting expectations. In a cinematic landscape dominated by women victims, Blinders flips the script by focusing on a powerless male figure. And while Sam, the only female character in the film, feels like a foil to Andy’s struggles, she became my favorite character as the credits rolled. 

Blinders is a movie that you feel like you’ve seen countless times before until it becomes something quite different. Where even a corny moment of Roger remotely controlling Andy’s computer while Andy watches on in horror, unable to do something, turns into a fascinating third act. Blinders surprised me by pitting my own expectations against myself and, for that, I commend it.