Movie miracle as N.J. filmmakers’ powerful debut lands at Cannes. Where to see ‘Gazer.’

Focus.

What do you see?

A man — an electrician — is on a ladder, installing light bulbs high up in the steeple of a church.

He gets a phone call.

The caller’s news rattles him so much he nearly loses his balance.

Looking back on the scene, the man, Ryan J. Sloan, remembers his precarious position.

“I almost fell off the f---ing ladder,” he says.

Because “Gazer,” the movie he made with co-writer and star Ariella Mastroianni, had just been accepted into an exclusive showcase at the Cannes Film Festival in France.

The caller was none other than Julien Rejl, artistic director of the Directors’ Fortnight (Quinzaine des Cinéastes) at Cannes, where the film would have its world premiere in May 2024.

This development seemed unfathomable, an absolute miracle for the New Jersey filmmakers and their self-financed, scrappily made indie noir thriller.

Sloan, 35, makes his feature directorial debut with “Gazer,” which he had only submitted for consideration after realizing the deadline was just hours away. Getting picked from the pile felt impossible. But he knew that all those days of chasing their passion — filming nights and weekends for two years while working multiple jobs — were well spent in pursuit of a story built on the slippery nature of each passing moment.

In “Gazer,” which opens in New York Friday, seconds, minutes and hours hang in the balance for a New Jersey woman in a hellish dance with time.

The story plays out on Mastroianni’s face, bathed in shadow and ringed by cropped hair, pictured through grainy 16mm film in scenes at foreboding Jersey apartment buildings, warehouses and one dark turnoff into the Meadowlands.

She leads the film as Frankie Rhodes, an outsider who becomes an insider ensnared by intrigue.

Frankie has a neurological condition called dyschronometria, which dramatically affects her ability to perceive time. She can black out in the middle of the day and awake at night, which isn’t exactly helpful when you’ve just become the protagonist in a rapidly unfolding mystery.

In an effort to tether herself in the present, she listens to cassette tapes of her own voice.

“Focus,” she says through the slight hiss of the tapes. “What do you see?”

There are more questions. Where are people going? What are they doing? What are they hiding?

All of these prompts are designed to get Frankie to turn her people-watching into stories. She wants to drive her attention to what’s happening in the now.

It’s how Frankie witnesses the animating event of the mystery — a lit window where she thinks she sees a woman being attacked by a man.

Her mantra also dials viewers into the story. Because in our addled, distracted, multi-screen state of media consumption, a call to “focus” also happens to be a pretty good way to open a movie.

From furlough to the big screen

“Gazer” is the first feature film written and produced by Sloan, who lives in Kearny, and Mastroianni, who lives in Montclair.

They started writing the script when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Ideas bubbled up during Mastroianni’s furlough from her job at the Angelika Film Center in New York.

Five years later, “Gazer” will launch its theatrical run at the same Houston Street theater in Manhattan.

It really hit home for the Jersey duo when “Gazer” trailers played before Oscar-winning film “The Brutalist.”

“I was working as an assistant in the programming department throughout the entire time we were developing ‘Gazer,‘” Mastroianni says. “So everyone at the company knew about it. I’m just so grateful that we get to premiere the film there. It’s such a fun, full-circle moment. They’re so supportive.”

The filmmakers say it was precisely that kind of support that allowed them a make rare breakthrough in what remains a rough but hopeful landscape for indie movies — one buoyed by the recent success of filmmakers like New Jersey’s own indie stalwart Sean Baker, director of the 2025 Oscar best picture winner “Anora.” (At the Independent Spirit Awards, Baker delivered a winning speech about the stark financial reality and years-long commitment involved in making independent films. At the Oscars, he called for film distributors to prioritize theatrical runs and for people to see movies at local theaters.)

David Laub, head of New York’s Metrograph Pictures, embraced “Gazer” after other distributors would not offer a theatrical release out of Cannes.

“We didn’t want to let the film kind of die on the vine (a streaming platform, Sloan says). We love a theatrical experience,” Mastroianni says of the decision to go with Metrograph.

“I feel like we found our people who really believe that a shift should happen,” she says. “From Julien (Rejl) and the (Cannes) Quinzaine, they really wanted to platform different types of films that were not studio films ... And then David has always been at the forefront of platforming independent cinema ... It takes change to happen from the top down.”

A film school of their own

Sloan and Mastroianni’s creative partnership is founded in longtime friendship.

While Sloan grew up in Kearny, Mastroianni spent her youngest years in Canada — Whitby, Ontario — before moving to Hoboken in 2002.

They met as teens. Though they attended different schools, they connected through mutual friends at High Tech High School, then located in North Bergen (now in Secaucus), where Mastroianni was a student.

“We grew up together and we always felt very spiritually connected in terms of our shared interests,” Mastroianni says. “We always loved movies, music. We just kind of immediately felt a kinship.”

Before writing “Gazer,” they created their own kind of film school without the tuition.

They immersed themselves in cinema by watching great movies and examining engrossing screenplays.

“We were revisiting a lot of these films that that meant a lot to us, that always, every time we watch them, they just got us so excited,” Mastroianni says.

They included influential thrillers like Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” (1966), Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974), Newark native Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out” (1981) — the second two taking inspiration from the first — and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958).

“We realized that they shared something called the spiral structure, and that kind of became our jumping off point, because we were able to identify the thing that struck us most about this kind of story,” she says. “They were character-driven stories within the context of these mysteries.”

At the center of the spiral in “Gazer” is what Frankie witnesses in the window — her entry point to a mystery, like photographer Thomas (David Hemmings) unwittingly documenting evidence of a murder in “Blow-Up” and sound recordist Jack (Englewood’s John Travolta) capturing a car accident in “Blow Out.”

Frankie’s brain condition is its own inescapable conflict. In one moment, she’s listening to her tape, and the next, she’s seemingly unconscious, transported to nightmarish scenes in what looks like another realm.

Sloan had previously co-helmed the 2019 short film “A Message for James" with Mastroianni. In deciding to write a feature, she took her stepfather’s advice: “If you want to write, then write, don’t wait for an invitation.”

They applied that same ethos to making “Gazer.” They wouldn’t hold out for any co-signs, just “fully believe in ourselves and do it,” Mastroianni says.

As they wrote, they sought the counsel of upstate New York director Bruce Wemple, a filmmaker who has cast Mastroianni in his movies. Sloan likens him to a Roger Corman figure for his prolific low-budget filmmaking.

“It was kind of a crash course into the reality that this can be done,” he says. “If there’s a fire burning inside you and you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get it done, you will. Even though we were broke — by the end of it, I was living out of a van — we never once regretted what we did."

Besides Sloan’s electrician day job an Mastroianni’s job at Angelika Film Center, she had a side gig and they both performed in a cover band on weekends while managing to film ... also on weekends.

It was exhausting.

“We were just working around the f---ing clock trying to make this movie,” Sloan says.

But Mastroianni doesn’t know what else they would put all their energy into — “this is the most amount of fun we could have,” she says.

“The reason why we made it is because it was a film that we hadn’t seen in a long time that we were craving, that we were missing. We weren’t focused on what the market wanted, we weren’t trying to be clever. I think if you’re ever trying to be clever in terms of what’s working or what people want, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. ‘Gazer’ is not something that the market wanted, not something that anyone wanted, but it found its place. And I’m glad it did.”

Mind, body, time, tape

Mastroianni’s interest in dyschronometria began as a fascination with how the brain perceives time.

She started thinking about the subject after reading neurologist Oliver Sacks’ 1985 nonfiction book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other Clinical Tales.”

“I studied philosophy in school, and I love the whole mind-body connection,” she says. “I was curious about whether or not there was a time perception disorder.”

Complicating matters in “Gazer” is the fact that Frankie’s condition is degenerative. The single mother urgently struggles to hold down a job with precious little time to save money and reunite with her daughter. Working as a gas station attendant, she strains to stay alert.

Mastroianni and Sloan were also inspired by the films of Paul Schrader, particularly his “God’s Lonely Man” character archetype, as seen in movies like “First Reformed" (2017).

“They often write in a notebook .... there’s some sort of voiceover narrative device,” she says.

Frankie can be heard through voiceovers and her tapes. Her narration works with the film’s murky look and moody saxophone to set a noir tone.

“It’s inherent in noir to have an unreliable narrator that’s narrating the entire film,” Sloan says. “Schrader kind of tweaked that by having somebody writing in a journal ... We thought ‘if we’re gonna do it, we need to do it differently.‘”

“The film demanded to be what it wanted to be,” he says.

Why does Frankie carry around cassette tapes when a smartphone could do the job?

She sticks to analog recording because flashing lights and bright screens can trigger her symptoms.

Sloan went analog in using 16mm film stock for “Gazer.” In the hands of cinematographer Matheus Bastos, it grants a lived-in look but can also make an empty room look scary.

“All the films that I grew up watching were shot on film, and many of the films today that I love, even (Darren Aronofsky’s Jersey-set) ’The Wrestler,’ which was 2008, and (Aronofsky’s) ’Black Swan,’ 2010, a lot of these films that I love and adore today are also shot on (16mm) film,” Sloan says.

“I think that there’s a feeling that is inherent in celluloid that sets a specific tone because it’s alive. The grain structure that’s dancing on the screen is never repeated in the same way. Whereas digitally, when they try to recreate it, it’s on a loop. ... It’s something cold and it’s zeros and ones, it’s computerized. But film is chemical reaction. It’s how we have experienced cinema for over 100 years, so to me it’s still very important that we shoot on this medium.”

Because film is expensive, Sloan limited Mastroianni to one or two takes per scene and other actors to two or three. They both think it was well worth the price.

“Frankie is forced to live an analog life in today’s very high-tech digital world, and what better way to represent that, if the whole film is from Frankie’s perspective, than to have this very, very grainy and gritty analog feel?” she says.

Mastroianni points out that the approach can be heard in the score from composer Steve Matthew Carter.

“Our main theme is very analog,” she says. “It’s brass. And then as Frankie’s condition starts to worsen, he introduces more digital, electric music.”

The tapes are Frankie’s lifeline. But when they fail to keep her alert and in tune with the now, another money-making opportunity comes her way.

A character named Paige (Renee Gagner) — the woman she saw in the window — offers her a big chunk of change to sneak into an apartment, steal a key and drive a car to the Meadowlands. She tells Frankie she’s trying to escape her abusive brother, the man from the window.

Frankie gets deeper into the mystery but is constantly set back when she zones out and loses time. She repeatedly enters the dream world of a house where she encounters the trauma of her past — her husband’s death.

In these scenes, “Gazer” follows the example of directors like David Lynch and David Cronenberg, dipping into the subconscious and body horror (an umbilical cord-like attachment channels Cronenberg’s 1999 film “Existenz”).

“How can time heal if you don’t even feel time passing?” Frankie’s neighbor asks in the film.

Despite obstacles from within and without, she stays on the trail of the mystery, lured by the promise getting money and reuniting with her daughter.

“We wanted to root for somebody,” Sloan says — particularly a “morally ambiguous” underdog.

“She’s really kind of moving through life as a ghost,” Mastroianni says.

Frankie stays on the margins, out of sight, until somebody sees her.

Movies with mom ... and her crushes

The tale of a mother facing incredible odds premieres this week.

But the story of a director presenting his film to the world began many years ago, with Sloan’s own mother.

She spent a lot of time watching movies with her son after she broke her back and legs in a fall.

“She doesn’t know, but she’s a big cinephile,” Sloan says. “It’s built upon crushes on actors like Al Pacino, De Niro, Keitel, Richard Gere ... I’ve seen pretty much all of the films that those men were in, and at a very young age.”

That, he says, was his first film school.

Besides re-reading director Sidney Lumet’s 1996 memoir “Making Movies” before each “Gazer” shoot, he would screen films for the crew in their Airbnbs during production.

“We went to go see ’The Conversation’ in 35mm at Film Forum in New York as a little family excursion halfway through shooting.”

In “Gazer,” Frankie’s condition and messages to herself evoke Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” (2000), while the film’s voyeurism echoes Hitchcock’s 1954 movie “Rear Window” (here, besides the lit window, there is a memorable rear-view mirror scene).

“I think I’m personally just fascinated by that aspect of cinema,” Sloan says. “Cinema is such an inherently voyeuristic thing. We’re just watching. We get in a dark room with strangers, and we’re together, but we’re also isolated and observing this thing, and we’re all taking something different from it. And I think that that’s kind of the magic of cinema.”

The magic of Jersey is fully evident in “Gazer.”

Frankie is seen in and around Newark. Her apartment was filmed in Kearny, with other locations including Jersey City’s Journal Square.

“Gazer” makes use of the dark mystique of the Meadowlands at night. Fish House Road, off the Newark-Jersey City Turnpike in Kearny, is the setting for a key scene. So is the TikTok-famous Lincoln Tunnel Motel in North Bergen.

Sloan was able to use his connections as an electrician to find places to film.

“Most of the locations were through customers,” he says. “We wanted to capture our home because it’s changing so much, it’s being gentrified.”

A factory warehouse in the movie is already gone.

“They’re building an apartment building there now,” Sloan says.

“Gazer” also embraces a time-honored tradition of people wanting to leave New Jersey, whether to escape their problems or chase a dream, vision or fantasy of some other place.

In a fateful diner meeting with Frankie, Paige says she wants to leave Jersey to flee her dangerous brother. Frankie has stars in her eyes when she talks about heading West — where her husband Roger wanted to go before he died.

Plenty of films highlight Jersey’s status as a shadowland to New York, but Sloan took a different approach.

“Ryan made the decision to never show New York City,” Mastroianni says.

“Even though it’s in the shadow of the city and all the characters are trying to escape, there really is so much reverence for where we grew up,” she says with a laugh. “We love it so much.”

You just can’t take the Jersey out of Jersey people.

While making the film, Sloan, who edited the movie, didn’t realize that Frankie working at a gas station in the beginning would be the tip-off that the story takes place here.

“One of my favorite Letterboxd reviews was ‘you know this film immediately is set in Jersey, but not just because she’s a gas station attendant, but because someone’s waiting no more than five minutes before they curse her out,‘” Mastroianni says.

A trilogy born in Jersey

Sloan’s last-minute submission to Cannes a year ago was a wild-card move.

“I didn’t tell anybody,” he says. “We were going through the editing process. I did an assembly cut, and then we both felt like something was wrong with the edit, but we couldn’t articulate what it was. And we very fortunately have a relationship with an incredible editor by the name of Yorgos Mavropsaridis (an Oscar nominee for the Yorgos Lanthimos films “Poor Things” and “The Favourite”) and he took a look at the edit and basically gave us notes.

“His main note was you can be more brave. And then he gave us ideas on how to do that. And as soon as we felt like it was in a good place — Ariel was at work, and I was just on the Quinzaine website — I’m like, ‘oh my god, the deadline’s today.’ So I just immediately submitted, did a Hail Mary and then told Ariella.”

When the call came in that they made it, he was out on that electrician job at the church.

Sloan and Mastroianni’s production company, Telstar Films, is named for Tel-Star Electric, his grandfather’s company in Kearny, where the director still works.

“The dream would be at some point to hire people to help us kind of run Telstar Films as a production company that helps other indie filmmakers make films,” he says.

He knows that might not be possible right now, given the focus on big-budget “event” films, even as filmmakers and theaters push for longer theatrical windows for all movies.

“I think that we’ve built up this idea that a film needs to make all this money back on the first three days of it being out or it’s a failure, and that’s not the case,” Sloan says.

For now, he and Mastroianni are plotting their next film. It will be the second in their Voyeur Trilogy, of which “Gazer” is the first.

“We tease the second one that we’re actually writing now in ‘Gazer,’ which is fun,” he says. “In the background on a billboard, there’s a company that’s going to be very prominent in the next film.”

While their movie received positive attention and critical praise at Cannes, this is only the start of the film’s introduction to the wider public.

“It does take a village to even just get it out there and get it on people’s radar, so the work’s not over yet,” Sloan says.

After New York, Mastroianni and Sloan have their hearts set on the Jersey film coming to Jersey.

“We definitely hope to be at The Clairidge,” Sloan says.

The Montclair movie theater is run by the nonprofit Montclair Film, and they have both volunteered at the Montclair Film Festival.

Sloan can picture it now.

“That would also be a dream come true to just see that on the marquee goin’ down Bloomfield Ave., you know?”

“Gazer,” which runs 1 hour and 54 minutes, is rated R and opens Friday, April 4 at Angelika Film Center in New York (18 W. Houston St.). Ryan J. Sloan and Ariella Mastroianni will participate in Q&A sessions after the 7 p.m. shows Thursday, April 3; Friday, April 4; and Saturday, April 5.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter/X, @amykup.bsky.social on Bluesky and @kupamy on Instagram and Threads.