Time in writer-director Evan Glodell's Bellflower is a linear path to a pitilessly bleak emotional abyss. Once the film's blustery dreams of self-destruction have been represented, they can't be taken back. Glodell doesn't valorize the green machismo and blustery one-upsmanship that he uses to characterize Woodrow's (Glodell himself) relationships with his best friend Aiden (Tyler Dawson) and the women that they both have crushes on. Instead, he presents Woodrow's tortured view of his recent past as a series of events that all led up to one crucial moment.

Woodrow, the film's precociously introverted main protagonist, eventually assumes the intuitively self-destructive persona he's been facetiously flirting with throughout the film. That transformation is frightening and all-consuming. We see the film's events distorted through the lens of Woodrow's desperate yearning to understand how things got so bad. The world of Bellflower is the world as imagined by Woodrow. He's constructed the film's narrative as a means of making sense of what he's done and futilely looking for a way to prevent what he knows will happen from happening. By film's end, Woodrow has created an elaborate self-flagellating daydream that becomes so puissant that it escapes from his head and takes on a life of its own. It's a fantasy of what will happen to him if he doesn't stop himself from further devolving into the monster he's jokingly imagined himself as. Still, regardless of whether this dream of fire, drugs, and mushroom clouds ever really comes to pass, Woodrow knows that just by imagining it, the damage he will potentially inflict on himself and others has already been done. And he only has himself to blame. Continue Reading »