There’s something vaguely masochistic about Kelly Reichardt’s Ode. Not in the fun, leather-and-latex kind of way — no, this is the quiet, drawn-out misery of watching grass grow in real time while someone whispers poetry you don’t care about. It’s a cinematic whisper. A sigh stretched out over 50 minutes. It’s the kind of movie that leaves you not just questioning the point of the film, but the point of electricity, of screens, of having ever evolved eyes.
Made for what seems like eleven dollars and a coupon to Subway, Ode is Reichardt’s black-and-white “adaptation” (and that word is doing backflips) of Paul Bowles’s short story of the same name. Except Reichardt doesn’t so much adapt the story as smother it in gauze, put it in a rusted-out trailer in the middle of nowhere, and let it die a slow, uneventful death.
The plot, and I use that word as charitably as possible, centers on a man named Roddy — a gay drifter and sometime hustler — who returns to his rural Southern hometown to confront a past that Reichardt has absolutely no interest in explaining. What happened to Roddy? Why is he broken? Why does he stare at walls like they owe him money? The film shrugs at all of this. It’s more interested in mood, in tone, in that delicate little nothingness that Reichardt loves to marinate in until it turns to mold.
Roddy’s main hobby appears to be walking around shirtless and looking mildly nauseous. He chain-smokes like he’s trying to build a fog machine out of trauma. He haunts a trailer park like a ghost who forgot what he was supposed to be avenging. Occasionally he interacts with a boyfriend or a memory or maybe a memory of a boyfriend — it’s hard to tell. Dialogue is minimal. Expression is nonexistent. If a facial tic escaped this movie, it would be considered an action scene.
The pacing of Ode is glacial. But not majestic, nature-doc glacial. More like the DMV line from hell. You keep waiting for something to happen, some kind of emotional breakthrough or visual jolt, but it never arrives. The whole thing feels like a meditation on silence, except the only thing it made me want to meditate on was how quickly I could turn it off without guilt.
The cinematography is grainy, shaky, and washed in an anesthetized grayscale that screams “student film.” It’s not artfully lo-fi — it’s just lo-fi. I’m not saying a film needs a budget to matter, but Ode looks like it was shot on a camcorder borrowed from a cousin who still owed Blockbuster late fees. At one point, the camera lingers on a doorway for so long I started to wonder if the door had union representation.
But maybe that’s the point. Reichardt doesn’t do narrative payoff. She doesn’t do structure, arcs, or momentum. She does tone poems — the kind of poems that hang above a toilet in a vegan café. Ode wants you to feel things without telling you what they are. It’s like being gaslit by a screensaver.
Now let’s talk performance. Todd Brooks, who plays Roddy, delivers his lines like he’s translating them from Morse code in real time. He pouts. He stares. He lays down in fetal position a lot. It’s hard to tell if the character is in pain or just allergic to the script. The supporting cast ranges from “former high school theater kid” to “local man who wandered onto the set,” and they all seem equally baffled about what they’re doing there.
There’s a loose suggestion of past abuse, internalized homophobia, and existential alienation, but none of it gets explored in any depth. It’s just hinted at with the subtlety of a Post-It note that says “Feel sad now.” The boyfriend character appears sporadically, mainly to look dreamy and tragic while whispering sweet nothings like “Are you okay?” and “Do you want a cigarette?” It’s the gay trauma version of Waiting for Godot, only Godot’s got better lighting and dialogue.
Some will defend Ode as a brave minimalist mood piece. A quietly devastating portrait of queer isolation. Those people are either lying or related to the cast. This isn’t minimalism — it’s emotional foreclosure. There’s a difference between a film being “slow and quiet” and a film being “empty and dazed.” One invites introspection; the other just makes you stare at the runtime and wonder how long a human soul can float outside its body before it decides to just leave.
It’s not that Reichardt is talentless — she isn’t. She’s made far better films since this sleepy little experiment, like Wendy and Lucy and First Cow, where the emotional barrenness had texture. But Ode is less an early work and more a warning label. A cinematic nicotine patch: you might’ve been addicted to plot and character once, but not anymore, buddy.
The most haunting thing about Ode isn’t the trauma of its characters — it’s the dull ache of time evaporating. You don’t watch this movie; you endure it. You sit through it like a bad church service for a religion you don’t believe in, delivered by someone who’s lost the sermon and decided to freestyle sadness.
Final Verdict:
Ode is the visual equivalent of being locked in a janitor’s closet with a box fan and a collection of old VHS tapes labeled “feelings.” It’s moody, murky, and masturbatory in the way only underfunded art cinema can be. Reichardt would later prove she could craft something haunting and honest. But Ode? This is a mood ring with a dead battery. A whisper in a thunderstorm. A gray sigh that goes on for 50 minutes too long.
