The Looking Glass

Faced with an anomaly, David Simmons says, people choose the explanation that’s easiest to believe. That can be difficult when you’re filming at midnight in a deserted VA psych ward, and your brothers—one a cameraman, the other an ex-Marine—come out white as a sheet, babbling something about hearing “a flailing gurgling scream” down the empty hall. And that was before crew members heard the sound of a child singing, and a blue-eyed man with no legs materialized in an elevator.

“There was some spooky strange stuff,” says Simmons, whose easiest explanation is sleep deprivation from shooting a feature film in 16 days on weekends only. The stuff writer-director Simmons describes is more explicit than anything in his first film, Prism, an insinuating supernatural shocker that makes its local premiere Thursday at the Belcourt.

A thriller about an autistic boy who sees his parents murdered, only to become mysteriously bound to the killer by a toy prism, it’s an attempt by Simmons to recapture the low-tech chills of movies such as the George C. Scott ghost story The Changeling, which depend on performances and atmosphere for their jolts.

“The first thing distributors usually say is, ‘Could we add some effects and a scene with a name actor?’ ” says Simmons, a New Orleans native who spent his childhood making home-movie Star Wars adventures edited with a razor blade. “Well, no thanks. It’s much more interesting if you never see [the threat]. There’s plausible deniability then.”

Shot with a local crew and lots of familiar faces from Nashville theater for less than $100,000, Prism stars Karen Garcia, an actress who’s worked mostly in New York and Miami, as a psychologist called in by police to unlock the traumatized boy’s memories. Her sessions with a series of mentally unstable patients—notably a gentle giant played by longtime Nashville actor Jeremy Childs, Garcia’s real-life fiancé—raise the possibility of something even harder to fathom than random killing.

Simmons says the movie gives “very clear” answers for all its mysteries. But he’d rather let audiences figure them out without his help. “People have lots of questions,” he says, mostly about whether the movie’s demons are imagined or real. “What’s greatest is to see them helping each other out, working through details.”

Prism is Simmons’ debut feature after years working on industrial films. While the movie looks more expensive than it was—for which Simmons credits cinematographer Matt Coale—it suffers from a dull, unconvincing romance between the psychologist and her superior (Matthew Carlton) and a slack first half. Just when you’re losing patience, though, two things happen. One is that the action switches mostly to the mental ward, where a leering inmate (an electric turn by Joshua Childs, Jeremy’s brother) delivers a surge of profane menace.

The other is the doctor’s attempt to reach the boy by bringing in her equally uncommunicative patient—a hair-raising scene that gives Jeremy Childs an audition-reel showstopper. “His instincts are so sharp,” Simmons says, adding that the veteran stage actor (now based with Garcia in Los Angeles) brought everything from his towering frame to his off-screen relationship with Garcia to bear on the scene.

Prism’s shoot couldn’t have gotten off to a rockier start. Just days before filming, in late August 2005, Simmons and his producer/cameraman brother Britt got a panicked phone call from their family north of New Orleans, smack in Hurricane Katrina’s path. The brothers secured a truck, drove to Louisiana and packed up their relatives, and hightailed it back to Nashville in time for filming the next day.

But if the lead-up to the shoot was rocky, most everything since has been charmed. Because Prism was shot on Sony’s Digital Master Tape, the electronics giant featured the Simmons brothers in a full-page ad on their site and in several movie magazines. David Simmons was invited to Sundance and Slamdance in 2006 to participate in some digital-filmmaking panels, and a brief mention in Filmmaker magazine put the movie on the radar. It turned up this year at Cannes’ cutthroat Marché du Film movie market—where, Simmons says, “all they want to know is, who’s in it?”

Here’s who: Josh Childs, casting director Jeff Boyet, local favorite Joe Keenan and supporting scene-stealer Ruth Galvaro—all of whom will be at the Belcourt Thursday night with additional cast and crew. Simmons will present two shows at 7 and 10 p.m., with a post-film Q&A after the 7 p.m. show. Admission is free.