BlinkDash

The movie is about Peter Winter (Peter Greene), who has a car but apparently no home, and has perhaps recently been released from treatment, although that is left vague. He wants to make a trip to see his daughter, from a marriage made before his condition developed. We follow every step of his excruciating journey, in a performance by Greene of great power and nerve.

There are terrors we can hardly imagine; he breaks out the glass of some of the car widows, and fills in the holes with taped newspapers. He wraps the rear-view mirrors of the car with paper.

Driven by some deep need, he tries to cut his hair and shave, and both operations produce painful cuts to which he seems oblivious.

The movie's sound track is sometimes harsh and obtrusive: We hear voices, some from the radio, some from inside his head or his memories. Power lines seem to emanate a low buzzing presence. The sound track is entirely subjective; in a restaurant, his head is filled with noise until the moment when he begins to put a lot of sugar into his coffee, and then there is complete silence, as if his absorption in the task has quieted the sounds for a moment.

There are a few quiet scenes outside his presence. We meet his mother, who calls his ex-wife and tells her, "Peter's back." He stops at his mother's house, and she expresses concern for him, but we can see at once she has a long, exhausting history of dealing with his condition. She gives him the makings of a sandwich, and he constructs it with the care a child might lavish on building blocks.

Eventually he does confront his young daughter.

What suffuses every moment of the movie is the constant agony he is in, because of the way his condition causes the everyday world or sensations to assault him. There is a gruesome moment when he cuts a fingernail loose from his finger (many viewers will close their eyes), as if the pain will for a moment free him from the greater pain of being alive.

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