‘Overwhelm the Sky': Daniel Kremer's Micro-Budgeted Indie is a Fearless Vision [Review]

Indie director Daniel Kremer has had seven feature-length productions to his name, but he goes for broke in the small-town epic “Overwhelm the Sky,” which had its World Premiere at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival in 2019. The film, a sort of existential neo-noir, was shot on a microbudget with a minimal crew in 2017 and clocks in at an ambitious 3 hours. Much like many micro-budgeted endeavors, it has had a slow, but successful, jaunt in the festival world for the better part of 2 years now. The end result, a, at times, overindulgent but impressive movie, proves just how much you can do, by sustaining a particular vision, with a limited budget. Undeserved obscurity is a fate this movie definitely doesn’t deserve.

“Overwhelm the Sky” has to do Eddie Huntly, a radio personality who moves to San Francisco, to inherit a friend’s graveyard hours late-night radio program, but to also marry Thea, the sister of his best friend Neil, a successful entrepreneur. However, the plot thickens once Neil is found murdered in Golden Gate Park. The police shrug it off as nothing more than a mugging-gone-bad, but not Eddie who regularly visits the scene where Neil’s corpse was found. Eventually, in one of these visits, he ends up involving himself with a person he thinks is connected to his friend’s death, to say more about “Overwhelm the Sky” would be unfair to the viewer since the pleasures of this indie movie do reside in freely throwing yourself into the rabbit holes Kremer continuously throws at you. I will admit that I was, at times, confused by the narrative, especially in the last third, but my attention never wandered, I never lost interest in the images and scenarios Kremer kept throwing at me.

Murder-mystery plot aside, Kremer is obviously paying tribute to his city of San Francisco, more specifically the romantic reputation it has built over the last 100 or so years and in film classics such as “Vertigo” and “Dirty Harry,” just to name a few. There’s also an immense influence towards the cinema of filmmaker Rob Nilsson, most especially Nilsson’s 1978 black-and-white masterpiece “Northen Lights,” whose brand of “loser” characters are all over “Overwhelm the Sky.” (Is it any coincidence then that Nillsson also has a cameo in Kremer’s movie?)

Also, much like “Northern Lights,” Kremer’s film is shot in beautiful black and white cinematography, courtesy of DP Aaron Hollander. Together Kremer and Hollander create a world with incredibly confident artistry, a sort of paranoid atmosphere that uses photography and moving images to tell a story in new and inventive ways. But “Overwhelm the Sky,” with its indefinable features, a film within a film potentially, is also about America, of yesteryear and today. The film also a loose adaptation of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel “Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker”— which happened to be written as the United States was entering its 30th year of existence. Some of the thematic resonances of Brown’s novel are maintained here including, and specifically, how a system can fail individuals in almost unimaginable ways.

“Overwhelm the Sky” will be screened at a California Film Institute event on March 6th.