Sunset Edge

The biggest selling point of Sunset Edge is the beautiful digital cinematography by Karim Lopez. The recent advancements in digital video technology have allowed no-budget filmmakers to capture stunning images in high resolution.

Peddle has more in mind than creating a stylized mood. His first narrative feature makes some astute observations about adolescence and identity, including that of the culturally shifting American South, in a way that is at once immediate and timeless.

The way the two story lines come together, involving paintball guns and morphsuits, is more mundane and less spooky than the tone up to that point suggests, but the point of Sunset Edge isn't really the surface narrative.

The film uses nonprofessional actors and has a good eye, but more story development and fewer lingering shots of the trash-strewn trailer park would have been an improvement.

Writer-director Daniel Peddle's anthropological concerns never really wed themselves to a sturdy narrative bedrock.

However oblique it remains, Sunset Edge feels like the work of curious filmmakers, searching for intangible truths in sights of people exploring both a past that’s been forgotten by most, and a present that can’t seem to quite move forward in any meaningful, appreciable way.

A coming-of-age drama that's also Southern Gothic ghost story, is an unusual, ambitious failure, mostly because the film's hyper-naturalistic style is meant to evoke a supernatural mood.