Director Colton Van Til takes a trippy deep dive into the dark heart of a 1950s American family in Meltdown: A Nuclear Family’s Ascension into Madness. This impressive fear-fare feature combines disorienting visuals — those with photosensitive epilepsy or other photosensitive issues are hereby warned — with a chilling mystery and heated drama.
Political candidate for city office Norman (William Elsman) and his wife Ruby (Hannah Beck), who served as a nurse in the armed forces, put on a brave front as Norman ramps up his campaign, with the unexplained disappearance of their youngest son a few years earlier still weighing heavily on them. Their teen daughter Joan (Maleah Goldberg), meanwhile, is secretly dating Galen (Finn Roberts), the son of Norman’s Bible-verse–spouting political rival George (Eric Hanson) and his heavily drinking wife Teresa (Celena Rae), and their preteen son Harry (Joshua Weatherby) is freely going against his parent’s wishes.
If that all sounds volatile enough already, add a dinner party between the two families in which LSD secretly winds up in the mix and things get really crazy — not to mention violent — and devastating secrets are revealed.
Van Til takes the theme of exposing the underbelly of the perfect American family cliché and puts an experimental horror spin on the proceedings. Working from a screenplay that he cowrote with Ashley Tropea and Sophia Hoefle, he has crafted a fascinating film bolstered by performances from a strong ensemble cast that also includes David Wendell Boykins as a newspaper reporter whose questions hit too close to home for Norman and Ruby, and Ernest Emmanuel Peeples as a blind acquaintance of theirs.
Jamal Green’s score keeps things off-kilter, due in no small part to some nerve-jangling percussion, while Thomas George’s cinematography is highly effective, helping keep the mystery going while often at other times getting up close to the actors to expose what their characters are going through. The editing by Alec Farmer and Van Til adds nicely to the weirdness of the dinner party and its fallout.
Aficionados of independent horror cinema that dares to take chances should find plenty to intrigue them with Meltdown: A Nuclear Family’s Ascension into Madness.
Meltdown: A Nuclear Family’s Ascension into Madness is part of Fantaspoa, which takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil from April 14–23.
