‘If you see him… run’
Mr. Jones is a 2013 horror thriller film and the feature film directorial debut of Karl Mueller, who also wrote the screenplay. It had its world debut on April 19, 2013 at the Tribeca Film Festival and was released on Blu-ray and DVD by Anchor Bay on May 2, 2014. It stars Jon Foster and Sarah Jones.
While filming, Mueller was inspired by director David Lynch and the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and wanted to design the film’s soundtrack to “make it feel like you’re under water, or in somebody’s head and they have a bad cold.”
He was also inspired by the memory of a neighbour of his during childhood in Minnesota, as the man had lived in a “primitive shack of a cabin with no running water, trapped animals and hung them up around the woods. He had lots of bizarre farming equipment overgrown by weeds around his house. He was the boogieman we made up stories about to scare ourselves at night.”
Plot teaser:
Penny (Sarah Jones) is on her way out to the woods to help her boyfriend Scott (Jon Foster) make a nature documentary. The two end up fighting, as Scott has not fully planned out his documentary and Penny had given up a good job to come help him. Things turn strange when one of Scott’s possessions is stolen, prompting the two to seek it out. They end up finding a cabin filled with various strange, weird artefacts and figures.
They eventually realise that the cabin is the home of Mr. Jones (Mark Steger), an elusive artist who sends his artwork to random people with no rhyme or reason. Scott investigates the mythology and rumours surrounding Mr. Jones with the intent to make him the subject of his next documentary, despite warnings that he stay far away from the man in question…
Reviews:
” … a thriller with a promising outsider-art premise that ultimately gets too wrapped up in mystical, reality-questioning headgames to tell a satisfying story. That failing and an annoying spin on the found-footage trope shouldn’t hurt much with genre auds, who will enjoy the distinctive atmosphere of this sometimes beautiful film.” John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter
“But as beautiful and creatively shot as the first half of the movie is, Mr. Jones takes an unfortunate turn at around the halfway mark. Much of the handheld camera work becomes shakier as the characters are in situations where they need to run. And everything eventually breaks down into disjointed, dream-like, choppy scenes. Things become hard to follow and sometimes even hard to see. By the time I got to the final ten minutes, I had had enough of the ongoing trippy scenes and was absolutely ready for the end.”Scott Hallam, Dread Central
“Their encounters with the silent creepster, in and out of his subterranean lair, are spooky, but Mr. Jonesultimately warps into a self-absorbed ode to its own making. By film’s end, it implies through easy montage barfs of Scott’s unedited doc footage that the story’s boogeyman isn’t so much scaring Scott and Penny as the couple is scaring themselves by trying to unravel the mystery of his identity. Mueller asks us to look at his film as one might Mr. Jones’s art—to validate its authenticity using a barometer of fear.” Ed Gonzalez, Slant
“You can’t really dip into dream logic if you have nary a single eye-popping visual, and in doing so, Mueller completely wastes a unique, potentially durable concept: just imagine a hooded monster in the woods making a side-living as an avant-garde darling of the art world. The movie you’ve now visualized in your head is probably a good deal more interesting than Mr. Jones.” Gabe Toro, Indiewire
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“An assaulting, strobing, surreal sprint through the forest, Chris and Penny keep encountering frightening visions of themselves and each other; the strangeness on display specifically recalling Lynch in its colors and frightening duality. It’s also massively frustrating. The choppy, jerking style employed by Mueller becomes abrasive in the extended sequence, wrapping up with a possibility there might not be as much to chew on as all the spectacle would have you believe. If you are not turned off, however, a second viewing seems in order.” Samuel Zimmerman, Fangoria
Cast:
- Jon Foster as Scott
- Sarah Jones as Penny
- Mark Steger as Mr. Jones
- Faran Tahir as The Anthropologist
- Stanley B. Herman as The Old Journalist
- Ethan Sawyer as Alleged Scarecrow Recipient
- Jordan Byrne as Peter Cavagnaro
- David Clennon as The Curator
- Jessica Dowdeswell as Penny
- Diane Neal as The Scholar
- Rachel O’Meara as The Skeptic
Buy Mr. Jones on DVD | Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk
Filming locations:
