Trona

A man, disillusioned with his life and bored by his surroundings, one day mysteriously finds himself in a barren desert. After making his way back to the edge of civilization, where he encounters a handful of local characters, the man decides to abandon his former life and reinvent himself.

The seductiveness of Trona comes from its compelling tone. The age-old storyline of a man lost and searching for something is rife with cliché – but in director David Fenster’s hands that storyline never flirts with pretension. Rather, it leads to a subtle comedic push and pull. As with the best of dry comedy, we can relate to the main character’s actions in the painfully small-town setting. David Nordstrom is riotously perfect as the deadpan lead, taking us through beautiful desert landscapes on a strange journey that reeks more of everyday bumbling than academic existentialism. Combine that with some of the more realistic – and entertaining – small-town denizens you could possibly hope for and you have quite the accidental vacation. It’s the trip that seemed to make sense when you were on it – but once you look back, you realize how insane it really was.