GREENPOINT FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW! In Go/Don’t Go, Adam (Alex Knapp) is a man alone in the world. The question is, what world is it? Quiet rooms and roads await Adam as he goes through the motions of each day. Long periods of isolated silence are punctuated by vivid memories of his life with a woman named K (Olivia Luccardi), his family, and humanity in general.
Locked in his own Lynchian black lodge, Adam does the routine tasks. He washes, eats meals, cleans up, and he even repairs his cars. However, Adam also has less pedestrian chores. He roams the local area from house to house checking light bulbs, giving the burned-out bulbs a burial complete with a marker. He tracks mysterious locations on a map marked Go/Don’t Go. Adam finds his car broken down in the road, marked with the ominous “Don’t go” red X symbol. As Adam roams around, it’s impossible to tell if he’s really in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or if he’s trapped in a metaphorical echo chamber in his mind.
“Quiet rooms and roads await Adam as he goes through the motions of each day.”
Knapp writes, directs, and stars in his first dramatic feature film. It is full of spaces. The images are haunting, and his isolation is searing, particularly when he flashes to his relationship with K. She appears to exist in Adam’s reality as a conceptual fragment that is either a bridge to his real-world or an anchor tying him to this self-selected nightmare. The possibilities are many and various. Could this be one kind of hell, like the dull fast-food job wasteland in Wristcutters: A Love Story?
The viewer is left to grapple with the clues consisting of random images, recovered pieces of the world, and mystery maps. He seems to be existing long after an apocalypse, but the water runs in his house, and the lights work. Clearly, someone is working in the utility plants. The food in the grocery is fresh and plentiful, so those are being restocked. Yet still, Adam sees no one anywhere. Perhaps he chooses not to?
Whether you enjoy the film will depend largely on where you are emotionally at the moment. Superficially, it’s solemn, quiet, and could be perceived as dull and unnecessarily opaque. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find a man trying desperately to ascend from this place to a better one.
Go/Don’t Goscreened at the 2020 Greenpoint Film Festival.
"…Could this be one kind of hell..."
