Brotherhood – DVD Review

DVD Reviews, Reviews, Top Story

Plenty of good films come and go from the festival circuit tour without ever truly experiencing a theatrical release for one specific reason: it doesn’t really have a niche to carve itself into theatrical audiences. Brotherhood was one of those kinds of films in that it never really found a way to carve an art house audience out for itself. A favorite at both the South by Southwest and the Dallas International Film Festival, Brotherhood had a limited release in Dallas outside of New York and Los Angeles but never caught on like one imagines the film-makers wanted it to. Which is a shame because it is quite imaginative and has some rather engaging material.

Brotherhood follows a fraternity prank gone wrong and the repercussions of trying to keep it from blowing up in their faces. As it keeps going from bad to worse, the boys have to make decisions that eventually come back with even more dangerous consequences. A thriller involving college kids trying to handle a serious matter on their own, and the internal struggle to do the right thing, doesn’t have much appeal to a mass market it seems and the film is getting a DVD release after not finding an audience in its brief theatrical run.

Frank (Jon Foster) is the senior fraternity member of Sigma Zeta Chi responsible for a simple prank. In the guise of making his pledges rob a liquor store for $19.10, representing a year in the lore of the fraternity, Frank is going through a routine night with Adam (Trevor Morgan), Kevin (Lou Taylor Pucci) and other young pledges when a critical mistake between the brothers leaves Kevin shot and bleeding in their van. Taken back to the fraternity house to figure things out, instead of a hospital, the fraternity tries to keep everything from exploding in their faces and, by proxy, put them in jail and bring down the fraternity itself. With time running out as Kevin deteriorates, Frank and Adam engage in a high stakes game with the young man’s life on the line. And the thing that keeps the film from descending into clichéd indie material is how Will Canon has designed it.

Taking the perspective of the fraternity brothers only, and keeping the story on them the entire time, we are under the same clock as they are. We don’t know what is happening outside of their little world, with the police potentially on the case, and it gives us a sense of danger that it could all unravel at any point. The tension never leaves because we don’t know what is going to happen or who is going to come through the door. It’s a gutsy decision and ultimately the right one; we’re given a slimmed down thriller where the clock is ticking. Not knowing is much more beneficial to the film than knowing; the bad decisions everyone makes seem almost rational because they don’t know what’s going to happen. They don’t know if they police know what’s happening or not; all they know is that they have to protect themselves from the consequences of their actions.

Canon, who also shares scripting credit, has also taken many lessons from horror films and applied them to this film. This is a fast paced thriller with many elements from that genre in terms of how it handles characters, etc. Everyone is painted with a broad stroke, with no real deep character depth involved, and the film moves fast enough that to stop for this would be to eliminate the film’s tight pacing and plot structure. Once the film begins its race to keep the truth from being discovered the only character depth is revealed during critical moments, when it’s needed, and the film works much stronger because of this. It works in many ways like a slasher film where we jump in early on, without a lot of buildup.

After a handful of short films, Will Canon has shown that he has the chops to take a feature length story and craft a tight narrative out of it. One can only imagine what he could do with a bigger budget, et al, because he’s shown some good chops for his feature length debut.

For a lower budgeted indie, Brotherhood has an excellent look and feel to it. The transfer reflects this as the film looks and sounds wonderfully.

None.

Brotherhood may be an oddity destined to find its way into a bin for the budget-conscious but it deserves more than that.


Phase 4 Films presents Brotherhood . Directed by Will Canon. Starring: Trevor Morgan, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jon Foster. Written by Will Canon and Douglas Simon Running time: 76 minutes. Rated R. Released on DVD and Blu-ray: May 17, 2011.