A Single Shot

A dark, tightly wound backwoods thriller with a twist, "A Single Shot" received warm applause following its second screening at the Berlinale, where it world-premiered Saturday night. Well-designed and executed by director David M. Rosenthal ("Janie Jones") from Matthew F. Jones’s script and novel of the same name, the film features uniformly fine performances by a cast including Sam Rockwell as an unlucky ex-farmer and hunter, Kelly Reilly as his estranged wife, an unrecognizable Jeffrey Wright as his alcoholic friend, William H. Macy as a gimpy small-town lawyer, and Joe Anderson and Jason Isaacs as seriously creepy denizens of the deep, wet forestlands.

Atli Örvarsson’s eery score and Edward Grau’s claustrophobic cinematography further the finger-clenching suspense.

A Berlin review roundup is below:

Indiewire:

Even before John Moon, the lonely woodsman played by Sam Rockwell at the center of David M. Rosenthal's "A Single Shot," accidentally shoots a young woman while hunting the desolate area near his trailer, his world has fallen apart. Rosenthal's adaptation of Matthew F. Jones' 1996 novel features a familiar arrangement of criminal events and showdowns, but the movie compensates for much of its familiar shortcomings with an effectively ominous atmosphere. The opening minutes, in which the grave-faced, bearded John roams the countryside in search of prey, establish a sense of isolation that dominates the movie and nearly rescues it from the formula that eventually takes shape.

The Hollywood Reporter:

In the grisly backwoods yarn A Single Shot, William H. Macy makes a couple of brief appearances as a low-rent small-town lawyer. He wears a screamingly obvious toupee, a cheap plaid jacket and garishly mismatched floral tie, plus he has a limp, a gammy arm and a chronic case of the shakes. All that’s missing are ill-fitting dentures. In many ways, this heavy-handed caricature epitomizes David M. Rosenthal’s misjudged thriller, an inbred child of A Simple Plan and Winter’s Bone that aims for atmospheric literary tragedy but instead delivers overripe pulp with pretensions.

The Playlist:

The main narrative surrounding the evolution of David M. Rosenthal’s “A Single Shot,” which premieres at the Berlin Film Festival today, has been about the longer-than-usual casting merry-go-round -- since 2009 a roster of talent as long as your arm has signed up then signed out of the film. However the fear that, as the accepted wisdom goes, there must be something fundamentally wrong with a project that takes this long to put together was somewhat mitigated by the kind of names who kept on stepping up: as worrying as it might be to lose the likes of (pre-breakout) Michael Fassbender, Alessandro Nivola, Forest Whitaker or Juliette Lewis, it doesn’t sting so hard when you get Sam Rockwell, William H. Macy, Jeffrey Wright and Jason Isaacs to show up instead -- all actors we admire. Except in this case, accepted wisdom should again be accepted: “A Single Shot” does not add up to anywhere near the sum of its parts, and as individually impressive as any of those parts might be (Rockwell), we are left with a film that if not quite a Frankenstein’s monster, is certainly patchworky.