Adrian Murray’s “Withdrawn” is like Gus Van Sant attempted mumblecore but decided to make it even more droning and monotonous. It’s kind of like performance art through and through, all testing our patience for the insanely mundane and minute, while character Aaron goes through his every day life literally doing nothing. About halfway he has some financial scheme planned to keep his rented room but that’s not the important element. It’s all about how tedious the film can get and if we’re willing to wait for our pay off, if it ever comes at all. Aaron fixes a fern. He looks up tutorials on trying to solve a rubiks cube, and even has a five minute telephone discussion where we only hear him talking to and responding to the individual. Yes, I get it.
Characters discuss politics while their television is off. Characters know about politics despite never really paying attention to television. Characters are having conversations central to the movie that never interest us. These “subtle nuances” are so on the nose. Director Adrian Murray’s film is something of an experiment, and in his press kit, he explains his characters motivations and key scenes he wrote for the sake of conveying character actions as people in the same space but never connecting. And while he observes the scenes time and time again, it’s never clarified to what end he is making the statement. It’s merely characters drifting through their lives, never quite connecting, never realizing they’re not connecting, and the end?
Director Adrian Murray frames many scenes with wide shots lingering on characters driving through streets and riding their bikes through alleys and sidewalks, leaving their backs turned to us almost all the time. There’s even a key scene where character Aaron is explaining the short dose of plot to another character, which is the center of the film, and it’s all filmed with the pair talking inside a coffee shop with the camera on the outside, almost as if the audience are really not to integral to the experience. Even when the movie alludes to some kind of storyline, the character more or less explains it to us, resolution and all, and we’re right back to characters just drifting back and forth. “Withdrawn” is described as a movie about wasted time, and in the end, it’s an apt summary of the film. Even at a little over seventy minutes, “Withdrawn” is a waste of time with a sprinkle of plot and narrative thrown in for the sake of calling it a movie.