“The Oak Room” aims high in trying to getting viewers to settle in and not see actors but a simple conversation, and the dialog is spiked a little too often with overheated confrontations or clumsy exposition to appear entirely natural. But once you do settle in—as with its effective, twisty, and mostly successful third act—you can feel more of what “The Oak Room” is so committed to, across different, more than decent lived-in performances. And it’s a testament to the craftiness of Genoway’s script that for all of the details laid out, for all of its wordiness and theatricality, these elements are mindful misdirections. It’s the facts that aren’t discussed, the names that aren’t revealed, that give the story its haunting quality.
Monday afternoon featured the world premiere of writer/director/cinematographer Orson Oblowitz’s “The Five Rules of Success,” a character study that takes after early Nicolas Winding Refn movies, both in sense of its gritty fever dreams and striking cinematography, but also in the sense that the storytelling isn’t all there yet. Instead it focuses on swinging for the fences, like with a big hit-and-miss performance from an alternately stoic and ferocious Santiago Segura, playing a man known as X. At the beginning, he leaves prison, in one extensive camera shot, on the basis of good behavior. In an empty apartment with no support group, X is trying to build himself from scratch. But as his pushy and eventually inappropriate parole officer (Isidora Goreshter) soon tells him, he’s “A prisoner on vacation.” The movie’s title comes from the guidelines X gives himself, which play out in sequences where things start to fall apart. Segura’s character tries to stay on the straight path with a restaurant job, despite having bad influence from his boss’ privileged son Danny (Jonathan Howard) who leans X back into a life of crime, even though the crime that put X in jail had nothing to do with drugs or money; true to the desired grandiosity of Oblowitz’s movie, it was far more gruesome and Shakespearean than that.
“The Five Rules of Success” is incredibly concerned with making sure that you get the points its trying to make, especially as it involves important themes about chances of recidivism in a country that sets some people up for failure more than others. The filmmaking is in-your-face with strobe light-like editing and evocative lighting, but loses its effectiveness because there’s barely any subtlety to balance it out, and as the story goes along it cuts at the tethers that keep it grounded, or believable. This is the kind of movie that caps off a shocking kill with someone saying “This is America,” or has yet another freak-out in which a character takes out their anger on the stuff in their living space. Eventually the movie becomes hard to accept as either literal or ephemeral; it’s plainly overzealous. To Oblowitz’s credit, he leans into all of this until the very end, when X devises a big plan that is more forced than it is believable, even if some people (in the movie) adore it as an art piece. Whatever parts of this movie are of an actual nightmare experienced by underestimated people just like X, Oblowitz’s own impulses seem to get in the way.
