Walnuts

Watching ‘Walnuts’ feels a lot like watching somebody else’s dream. It’s got all the craziness and insanity of a dream. Very little of ‘Walnuts’ makes any sense, as one might expect from a film with such a title, but whereas in your own dream this is fine, because you have a base level of understanding and are tied intrinsically to the dream, with ‘Walnuts’ this is far from the case. Like watching another’s dream, you are left only with the weirdness, and with none of the emotion - be it fear, joy, sadness - that comes with it.

The film opens with the age old adage ‘we all have attics in our closets’. That establishes early on the deep level of confusion and madness that will follow. At least at first there is a degree of sanity, as the actor Jerry Stax (played by Jonas Ball) crashes out of his performance, refusing to take to the stage in a drunken rage. This is no mere drunken rage, however, there’s something deeply wrong with Jerry, who has lost his lust for his acting career and even life itself. To try and revitalise his spirits and solve his crisis, his friend, Terry Ruggles (played by Kyle Shevrin), takes him to rehab at a remote locale in deep Americana, where madness truly reigns.

It’s a kind of creative rehab clinic, ran by an enigmatic doctor called Buck (played by Obren Milanovic ), who follows only the doctrine of “pure imagination” - think Gene Wilder - and hosts many participants - all of them wacky in their own way. These include Lloyd (played by Nathan G. Johnson) - a former pornstar obsessed with Jerry and naked far too often; a woman masquerading as a gunslinger and a man in a perpetual state of fighting in war. At times it is difficult to tell when this wide array of characters are acting and when they are simply being themselves. That in itself makes it a lot harder to engage in the film - never certain when you are watching a charade or reality. Perhaps in some ways that is done in order to empathise more with Jerry - the straight man in a world of weirdness - though for much of the film there is a total disconnect with Jerry too, as he fails to stand out in the gallery of nuts.

Each day there seems to be another immersive creative experience, with varying degrees of success, but outside hillbilly forces loom, and eventually they come to threaten the sanctity of Doctor Buck’s operation and the madness becomes homicidal and violent. ‘Walnuts’ is technically marvellous, and Jonas Ball directs the film with plenty of confidence and visual gusto that makes it interesting even when you’ve no idea what’s going on. Ball, and the other actors, all play their roles well and bounce off each other with a natural chemistry that makes the madness a hell of a lot more easy to go with.

However, the script, for all its wonderful innovation and creativity - which should be praised - is ultimately a let down. It’s as though we’re being let in on Jonas Ball’s own private joke, and as much as we want to understand and laugh along, he never quite tells the story in a way that allows us to. Whilst there is strength in the weirdness of ‘Walnuts’, it is far from welcoming, and never reaches the potential that is clearly there.