Before I’m Dead

Directed by J.R. Sawyers, Before I’m Dead follows Sawyers’ Nolan Cruise as he develops a severe case of agoraphobia in the wake of his wife’s (Camille Montgomery’s Carla) killing by a mass shooter – with the narrative detailing Nolan’s efforts at coping with a crumbling mental state that eventually takes on a decidedly unexpected dimension. Filmmaker Sawyers, working from a script written with Jessica Hill, delivers a slow-moving drama that just about as rough-around-the-edges as one could possibly envision, as the movie, which ultimately feels like a short that’s been awkwardly expanded to feature length, suffers from a sluggish atmosphere that’s compounded by a general absence of compelling, attention-grabbing elements – with Sawyers’ admittedly stirring performance increasingly unable to compensate for a meandering, far-from-focused storyline. And although the movie contains its fair share of striking images and sequences, including an impressively solid jump scare about midway through, Before I’m Dead eventually progresses into a second half that abandons any pretense of exploring Nolan’s damaged psyche and instead emphasizes the character’s fairly tedious is-it-real-or-is-it-just-in-his-head type exploits – with the sci-fi-friendly bent of the movie’s climactic stretch, as a result, unable to pack the visceral, exciting punch that Sawyers has obviously intended (ie it’s impossible, given the uncertainty of how much of this, if any of it, is actually happening, to wholeheartedly connect to Nolan’s perilous plight). The end result is an exceedingly earnest yet disappointingly ineffective piece of work that operates best as a calling-card for Sawyers, as the fledgling filmmaker generally does a better-than-expected job of wringing an often impressive amount of production values out of what must have been a shoestring budget.

** out of ****