Safety Not Guaranteed – review

This first feature by San Francisco-based director Colin Trevorrow is very much a whimsical product of both the Sundance Institute's brand of independent cinema and the rambling, low-budget movie genre known as mumblecore. The latter features characters who live in the interstices of society and are as talkative as they are inactive, and the term was coined in the earlier years of this century by Eric Masunaga, a sound editor who works in this area. One of the leading roles in Safety Not Guaranteed is played by the writer-director Mark Duplass, who with his brother, Jay, pioneered mumblecore, most notably in their picture The Puffy Chair, the shaggy dog tale of a search around the American south for an old lounge chair to be given as a birthday present to their father. They went on to make Jeff Who Lives at Home, which featured the familiar faces of Jason Segel, Susan Sarandon and Judy Greer, and virtually brought mumblecore into the cinematic mainstream.

Produced by the people behind Little Miss Sunshine, and apparently inspired by an actual newspaper ad, Safety Not Guaranteed has at its centre a typical mumblecore character. She's a good-looking young woman called Darius (Aubrey Plaza), a recent graduate who is amusingly observed drifting in a world she finds empty and pointless. She finally gets a job as an intern on a smart Seattle magazine and is picked, more or less at random, along with an intense young Indian to assist on a story being written by a cynical, ageing hippie, Jeff (Jake Johnson).

He's about to investigate a small ad in a Washington state newspaper inviting the right applicant to take part in an experiment in space travel, giving a mailbox number in a small seaside resort and adding the caution "safety not guaranteed". It's an intriguing prospect that takes the devious, tight-fisted Jeff and his proteges to a seedy, out-of-season resort where they play detective, hunting down the would-be space traveller to the local branch of a grocery chain. He's Kenneth (played by the surly, good-looking Duplass), a clerk and shelf-stacker of a conspiratorial bent, living alone in a dilapidated house.

Jeff, who is using the expedition to the area to look up an old flame, fails to penetrate Kenneth's protective cloak and sends in Darius to pose as an applicant with good reasons to travel in time. At this point it's difficult to tell whether we're in for a thriller or a black comedy about a paranoid loner, and indeed the film-makers themselves never quite decide. Darius, a sort of suburban malcontent, becomes Kenneth's confidante and collaborator and is drawn into his obsessive world, assisting him to steal equipment from a laboratory to help build his Heath Robinson version of a time machine. It is said that even paranoids have enemies, and it turns out that Kenneth is under surveillance by a parodic pair of identical federal agents. In a curious way the film – or at least its mysterious ending – brought back happy memories of a study of discontent, detachment and withdrawal from society that I haven't seen for many years: Charlie Bubbles, which Shelagh Delaney wrote, and Albert Finney directed and starred in.

Safety Not Guaranteed takes mumblecore characters and makes them act out their fantasies, and the results, as here, can be comic, tragic, mundane or something weirdly transcendental. It's not a satisfactory film, but it's well acted, funny in a troubling, low-key way, and offers revealing insights into the world of people permanently at odds with modern society and in search of ways either to escape or to express their discontent.