British director Stuart Gatt’s confidently handled debut is a tale of two trailers: one a banged-up redneck bolthole in a godforsaken Texas desert commune; the other the minimalist glamping palace opposite. Taciturn meathead Clyde (Jai Courtney) occupies the former with his downtrodden wife, Geena (Erin Moriarty), and is none too pleased when vacationing New Yorkers Andy (Ryan Corr) and Amaya (Dina Shihabi) pitch up. Not just because their swanky digs are ridiculously out of place, but because their presence might draw attention to what he’s doing out there in the first place.
Where many foreign directors come a cropper trying to show fealty to classic American iconography, Gatt has the confidence to do his own thing – kicking this off as a cagey town and country comedy of manners. The urbanites upend Clyde’s established order with deluxe pastries and matcha; after pulling a gun on them in their initial meeting, he retreats to passive-aggressive warfare on the vegetable patch. Then Andy unknowingly ups the ante when he begins tutoring amateur artist Geena, introducing her to abstract expressionism. “Be honest” is how he encourages her to find her truth – and Gatt himself has an admirable looseness. Instead of merely serving up straight badlands attitude, his camera roves in search of mini-revelations, like the arcing shot over Clyde and Geena’s trailer that announces the new arrivals, and resonant details, like a queasy slick of shifting red paint that seems to animate Andy’s anxiety dreams.
Though Catching Dust eventually settles into a more conventional noir register, Gatt commits to his characters and follows them to unlikely destinations (even if the often elliptical storytelling sometimes makes the route hard to follow). Man-mountain Clyde in particular turns out to have good reason for his controlling behaviour, and this morass of hard-bitten insecurities and abrupt tenderness is superbly portrayed by Courtney despite having precious little dialogue. This is an adventurous and eccentric hunk of desert noir.
• Catching Dust is available on digital platforms from 20 January.
