David Gordon Green's directorial debut, the extraordinarily lyrical George Washington (2000), unfolded its junky, ethereal atmosphere with a near-complete disregard for plot mechanics. Green's second film, All the Real Girls (2003), attempted the same disconnected mood, but now spattered through a story about a womanizer who falls in love for the first time.
His third film, Undertow, continues in the same vein. The mood is still there, but now the plot has grown more rudimentary, even ludicrous. It plays like nothing more than an exceedingly well-directed Friday the 13th sequel.
Undertow tells the story of a Southern family: soft-spoken father, John (Dermot Mulroney), troublesome older boy, Chris (Jamie Bell), and sickly younger boy, Tim (Devon Alan)—their mother long ago passed on. John's brother, Deel (Josh Lucas), turns up on their doorstep and is invited to stay. It turns out the menacing Deel is really after a case of gold coins their father once collected. He stops at nothing to get them, not even killing his own brother and stalking the two boys across hill and dale.
Deel is the new Jason Voorhees: The boys push him out a window, hit him with a shovel, smack him and batter him in various ways. Yet he keeps getting up and keeps coming back.
Eventually, the movie's sustained ambience gives way to a kind of sickly, thudding suspense, and these elements fail to work together. Green has said he enjoys these kinds of odd crossovers (such as the creators of Jackass directing a remake of Splendor in the Grass), but in this case he merely turns a smart film into a dumb one.
Working with his constant collaborator, cinematographer Tim Orr, Green has been often compared to Terrence Malick, who is credited here as a producer. Over the course of his own three films (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line), Malick has steadily moved away from ordinary plot mechanics and into pure poetry.
Green appears to be on the opposite track. Undertow still has a haunting sense of place, notably when the young refugees arrive at a kind of hideout in the woods, a graffiti-covered, half-demolished building by a serene lake. If this film were a debut, it would be only the promising calling card of a talented director. But Green can do better.