A desert set thriller of high stakes and strong performances, Dig is a film of clear influences, yet stands on its own as a solid genre piece.
Dig is very much a throwback to early 90s thrillers such as Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers, a time when crime thrillers set in the desert were all the rage.
That is not to say that Dig is on the same level as classics like Red Rock West and One False Move. The film – directed by K. Asher Levin (Courgars Inc) and written by Banipal and Benhur Ablakhad – stars Thomas Jane as Scott Brennan, a recently widowed father who is struggling to raise his deaf teenage daughter Jane (Harlow Jane). When Scott is hired to excavate a long-abandoned property, he and Jane are taken hostage by a dangerous couple (Emile Hirsch and Liano Liberato) and forced to unearth an unknown object under a vacant house.
Hirsch and Liberato’s sadistic couple, Victor and Lola, are very much modelled in the vein of Micky and Mallory from Natural Born Killers, with their unsatiable thirst for violence and sex resulting in a twisted romance that devours everything in their path. Hirsch and Liberato are suitably over the top in their roles, often shouting obscenities and threats to their captors when not declaring their love for one another exclaimed with passionate kisses. It’s predictable stuff, yet effective.
More interesting is the films other pair, a father and daughter emotionally estranged through grief and guilt, played by real-life father and daughter Thomas and Harlow Jane. Where Hirsch and Liberato provide the flash, the Jane’s deliver the depth needed in this fight-for-survival thriller to truly resonate in its stakes.
Jane, a favourite of genre film fans, especially delivers a strong turn as a guilt-ridden widower whose own capacity for violence unintentionally leads to the death of his wife, which is depicted in a tense opening sequence.
Levin, a prolific filmmaker who returns to feature films after a stint working in digital production, milks all the familiar tropes to create an unoriginal, yet solid crime thriller.
