So begins
Southland Tales, the wildly ambitious second film from writer/director Richard Kelly. Kellyâs three films (
Donnie Darko, Southland Tales, The Box) all share a unique sensibility, featuring outsider characters struggling to exist within a mundane normal in the foreground, with the very nature of existence and reality up for the debate against the margins. In these works, Kelly frequently uses the element of water, and the concept of time, as the shades he colors with. Though his work is more structured than that of David Lynch, he operates within a similar space where the very look and texture of the filmmaking is as important as whatâs on the page. Like Lynch, how the film makes you feel as you watch it is as much of the intended experience as the plot, and like Lynch, these films make instinctual sense to a certain percentage of moviegoers, while the wider audience struggles to make sense of it no matter how many explanations may be offered.