Jason Sondhi
The description of Tim of the Jungle promises a classic family drama, full of insight into the messy dynamics of domesticity, and delivering weighty emotion. The extent to which that expectation is upended is a large part of its appeal, but let me just say that Greek immigrant Nasos Gatzoulis’ AFI student film is weird. Borderline experimental. Off-kilter from the start in a sardonic way, the film devolves into a frenzy of violence and psychosis that keeps you delightfully on your toes. While hard to find satisfaction in what it all means, watching Gatzoulis’ operate within this fun-house mirror of a nuclear family is very fun, and establishes him as a filmmaker with an unusually strong cinematic voice.
At the open, Tim is operating on a deadline. He’s promised to deliver a score for a wretchedly bad horror film, and really needs to get down to work. His dad is an engaging sort of guy, but seems to have stopped taking his pills. His behavior becomes more erratic as paranoia and anger flare up. His mom is warm to Tim, but increasingly fed up with her husband, and when she’s accused of infidelity, thing get chaotic and downright surreal, with a weary Tim caught in the middle.
The film is less concerned with what it’s about however, then how it’s about it. Shot on Alexa in B&W, the production is super stylish, and Natzoulis’ background as a music video director is apparent in the unusual shot selections and disruptive editing rhythms. Gatzoulis wants to depict an ordinary dysfunctional family situation as a horror film, and sneakily turns in one of the more formally inventive horror entries of recent memory. Described by the director as a “personal story” one of his goals was to show how a teenager deals with a chaotic home life and yet still “get to a creative place through that darkness”—in this case Tim’s translation of his surrounding horror into music.
Tim’s music is an important part of the film, as it really helps drive the narrative pace and structure of the film. For such an important element however, it was not completed until post-production. Gatzoulis describes the unusual steps that he and his team used to get around that, “On set, our lead actor had an earpiece, which was playing temp music on the BPM’s that the final song would be playing. So, our only commitment with the music was its tempo. This gave us the freedom to add the sounds and diegetic music that were coming out of the lead’s music program and modulars at the very end, without needing to commit to very specific music from the beginning. This way the music complimented the movie and not vice versa.”
Tim of the Jungle was Gatzoulis’ student film at the prestigious American Film Institute, and the director is currently adapting another of his student works, Two Raccoons, which he hopes to make as his debut feature. AFI films always show a strong technical command and impressive production values, but more rare is the mastery of tone and cinematic language that Gatzoulis displays here. We’re used to dissecting films thematically or in terms of narrative machinations, but Tim of the Jungle is delightful visually in pure cinematic terms. That’s harder to teach I think, and promises a bright future for Gatzoulis.