Formerly famous: Jo Schaeffer as a fallen internet star in ‘The Ego Death of Queen Cecilia’.

Here is this month’s review batch of some very good indie films (well, most.) Requests for coverage are always welcome via the site’s contact form. Thank you.

THE EGO DEATH OF QUEEN CECILIA **** (86 minutes)
The desperate soul at the frosty heart of this outstanding, compelling, tightly directed drama occupies a living hell freshly forged by the social media era.

Package delivery driver Cecilia (Jo Schaeffer) is stuck in a suffocating nightmare. As online sensation Queen Cecilia she once presided over a huge following who provided her with a lucrative income.

Now gone, she finds herself in the worst of all possible worlds – an influencer who has lost all influence. Staring into the Stygian depths of irrelevance, her only hope is to engage the services of an A-list PR operator who might just be able to get Cecilia back the cyber fame she painfully misses. The fee is $20,000 – which she doesn’t have.

To say Cecilia is a mess is a grand understatement, and the character presented by Chris Beier – pulling quadruple duty as writer, director, editor and cinematographer – is an absorbing portrait of a person who would be hanging on by her fingernails if only she would stop biting them.

The rollercoaster experience of online fame has left Cecilia adrift in middle age with no sense of judgement, no people skills, no self worth, no common sense and a crushing need for validation.

This harrowing quagmire leads her down a path where bad choices, bad luck and plain old stupidity propel her into the orbit of some mean hombres who blackmail her into some extremely high-risk criminal activity where she is coldly warned, if she gets caught she’s on her own.

Graced by a superb central performance by Schaeffer, who presents Cecilia as a knot of desperation, anger and frustration, Beier skillfully blends social media culture into an ever-tightening slow-burn crime drama, all driven by an increasingly gripping personal odyssey.

The deliberate pacing is especially effective. Beier doesn’t rush matters, allowing scenes to unfold at an unforced clip with naturalistic performances and dialogue that rings true.

Most impressive is the finely judged point where we leave Cecilia, her desperation, foolishness and need for approval bound together by a single gossamer of hope.

It’s a quietly powerful ending to an accomplished piece, one of the best films in recent memory about the underside of easy fame.

AMERICAN TRASH *** (115 minutes)
Taking away a man’s reason to live is bad enough. Take away his reason to love and you’ve got an emotional powder keg looking for a spark.

Such is the intriguing premise of Robert LaSardo’s tough-minded, well-sculpted character piece in which a man at war with himself finds peace with a girl half his age.

When his new-found sense of tranquility is violated, however, Milles (LaSardo) finds his quest for inner peace struggling with his violent impulses.

Try as he might to keep it together in the less touristy parts of LA’s Venice Beach, the man is on a hair trigger, primed to go off at the slightest provocation. Central to the character’s disturbing make-up is how aware he is of his behaviour.

Complicating our understanding of Milles is his obsession with the utterances of Charles Manson from whom he draws inspiration, often to the chagrin of those close to him.

It’s a singularly confronting story element, all-the-better for being so deliberately problematic (a rare quality) and is well-woven into the narrative as a sign of his increasingly obvious psychosis.

One telling scene at the beach involving two litterbugs is especially strong, highlighting how the violent behaviour Milles regards as noble is seen by others as repulsive. Just like Manson.

LaSardo, a veteran character actor often cast as the heavy, does well here as both director and lead. (He co-penned the film with Adrian Milnes, co-writer of the sub-standard actioner The Bouncer.)

With an intimidating, goateed visage that could rob banks without the need for a gun, LaSardo’s portrayal of a hard man with a vulnerable, arguably naive side is believable, particularly in scenes where both aspects grind against each other.

American Trash marks his impressive debut as a director; he clearly has an instinct for decrepit atmospherics and good performances, though the dialogue occasionally sounds a bit tinny and the pacing is patchy.

Some scenes drag, especially in the second act, and all up the film feels long by about 10 minutes.

Punchy and pungent as American Trash is, it would probably have been even better had it been shorter – which could be said of most films these days.

Catch the film on: Apple TV; Amazon Prime; DeepC Digital Link; Plex TV

A/WAY ***1/2 (62 mins)
In a beautifully etched rumination about loss and romance, newbie travel journalist Anna (Rosie McDonald) tours the Caribbean Island of Martinique where she mixes with the locals while reflecting on her friendships, romantic failures and the painful passing of her mother, whose close friend gives her a diary she secretly kept.

Structured around prolonged flashbacks and featuring some good camerawork, director Derek Shane Garcia skilfully imbues the piece with a refreshing free-form feel, mixing scripted scenes and improvised encounters as Anna interacts with the island locals.

Working through the emotional reverberations of her mother’s death, Anna also processes the thorny reality of her erratic romantic life, from a very comical montage chronicling a string of disastrous app-generated dates to her more serious and sobering relationship with a fellow college student.

A finely honed cinematic squib that doesn’t follow a conventional structure, A/way nonetheless delivers a satisfying sense of closure to a deftly honed emotional portraiture of a disoriented young woman finding her way.

For more go here A/way will be at the Beyond Hollywood International Film Festival, 1-4 May.

SÉANCE *** (85 minutes)
A picturesque, sun-blessed beach serves as a fitting counterpoint to the dark goings on in this polished, spook-inspired four-hander about a haunted house, a haunted mind and two magnificently discontented couples.

Set in 1890s California, successful novelist Emma Strand (Scottie Thompson) is having trouble with her fawning new husband Albert (Connor Paolo). He’s a painter by trade and a sycophant by nature, apparently too eager-to-please for Emma, wishing her man was a bit more, well, manly.

Sitting on the beach they are happened upon by Emma’s first husband George (Jilon VanOver) and his porcellanous new wife Lillian (Vivian Kerr) who, we quickly learn, has serious boundary issues.

At an awkward dinner that night we learn that she’s got a bunch of other issues to boot, mostly to do with a deep belief in the hereafter prompted by the tragic drowning of daughter Hazel, with whom Lillian is desperate to contact via home-baked séances.

There are rumblings during an impromptu session but is there really a spirit in the room or is it all in Lillian’s troubled head?

On top of that there’s some underhanded energy between Emma and George, suggesting the meeting on the beach might not have been due to mere happenstance.

Having proved her salt with the hot-mess drama Scrap, writer/director Vivian Kerr deploys a dab hand here, fashioning a first-class drama full of suspense and delicious Goth visuals (women in dark corridors holding candles – love it) as our quartet become entangled in the crosscurrents of deceit and hidden desire.

Performances are solid throughout, though Connor Paolo is the stand-out as the compliant guy who ultimately has to decide whether he is a coward or a man of mettle.

As an actor’s director, Kerr again shows a great sureness of touch, eliciting a degree of subtlety from her players that we don’t usually see in genre pieces of this stamp.

For more on the film, including details about upcoming festival screenings, head here; Check out Vivian Kerr’s production company Rue Dangeau and its nascent YouTube channel, which has even more links.

ALIEN LOVE 1/2 (75 minutes)
As much as we like to laud any person or team with the tenacity and fortitude to make an independent film, it need be stressed that any such endeavour must satisfy the basic tenets of narrative coherence for the enterprise to be deemed worthwhile. That is not the case here.

In Alien Love a NASA astronaut (Nathan Hill) returns from space to his Melbourne wife (Ira Chakraborty), only she senses from his odd behaviour that something is amiss, making her wonder whether the foetus gestating inside her is human.

The film isn’t merely terrible; it’s so laughably bad it might have been better to make it as a meta-comedy about an ultra-low budget film. Think The Emu War, only funny. It’s that close to self-parody.

Molecule-thin production values, dreadful performances, gross miscasting and a finale involving – would you believe? – a snail-paced foot chase where the pursuer changes to a different person from shot to shot, are but a few of the film’s many woes.

In the spirit of being constructive, it is an invariably good idea to ensure all the elements needed for a good movie – cast; story; dialogue; concept – are firmly in place before a frame is shot. You don’t need a big budget to make a fine film, just a cohesive vision for what the piece is supposed to be.

Regrettably, there’s no sign of that in Alien Love, which signalled in its first few minutes that it was going to be a very tough sit. That it was.