Moss

A well-intended drama that might have worked a little better on a slow simmer instead of a full boil, Moss is an overwrought, noisy film set in the wilds of North Carolina, where the title character (Mitchell Slaggert) has just turned 18 and is feeling an urgent need to break away from the isolation of the home he shares with his widower father (Billy Ray Suggs). The two seem to be in perpetual conflict, driven in part by a tragic legacy: the death of Moss’s mother during his birth. Moss sees his father as a broken, compromised man, weak and reduced to making a living selling the driftwood sculptures he carves. On this milestone birthday, Moss rebels against his father’s order to deliver medicine to Moss’s grandmother, opting instead to row a boat along a river, where he discovers a mysterious, beautiful, 30-year-old woman named Mary (Christine Marzano) camping alone and on some unspecified journey of her own. At this point, the fairy-tale tropes underlying this rite-of-passage story—the trip to grandma’s house; Moss’s timely, Oedipal encounter with Mary—become both obvious and preposterous. Optional. (T. Keogh)