By Robert Scucci
| Published
There’s nothing I hate more in movies than over-explanation, unnecessary exposition dumps and worldbuilding, and generally any form of “telling without showing” that suggests the filmmaker thinks they’re smarter than the audience and need to spoonfeed everything. It’s one of the reasons why I love Mad Max canon so much, because it’s not actually canonical. It’s people living in an already established world, doing the things they do, and everything is so lived in that all you need to know is a few basic rules of the road and how people living in that particular fiction deal with their reality.
When I stumbled upon 2023’s Falling Stars, I was happy to find out that the whole film gets that Mad Max kind of treatment. We know there are witches, annual events, and a laundry list of rules that people need to follow during the harvest period if they want to live to see another year. But those rules are never fully or formally explained. We learn the implications of these rules by watching characters who know them make very misguided decisions, and reacting accordingly when they’re broken.
It’s the perfect way to present a group of people’s fear of the unknown to an audience. The suspense comes from knowing that everybody knows they need to act a certain way, but deviates from the established etiquette they’re supposed to follow. From there, it’s anybody’s guess as to how everything’s going to shake out, and even the people we’re following don’t necessarily know what’s up because when things truly go sideways, there’s no real way to navigate the situation.
Witches Gonna Witch
Falling Stars takes place in a version of the American West where witches are very real, everybody knows they’re real, and the first night of harvest means you’d better follow the rules. As witches streak across the sky like falling stars, brothers Mike (Shaun Duke Jr.), Sal (Andrew Gabriel), and Adam (Rene Leech) head into the desert with their friend Rob (Greg Poppa), who just so happens to have killed and buried one of them the previous year. Naturally, seeing a dead witch with your own eyes sounds like a perfectly reasonable way to spend the evening, provided everybody can keep their hands to themselves (spoiler alert: whoops!).
After the witch is accidentally desecrated (read: has beer spilled on it by a total lightweight), Mike learns that leaving well enough alone is no longer an option. His mother Danni (Diane Box Worman) makes it clear that the body needs to be burned before sunrise, while a local radio broadcast hosted by Barry (J. Aaron Boykin) and Elana (Samantha Turret) offers an unsettling glimpse at how everybody else is handling the harvest. Strange astrological signs aren’t helping matters, and when the possibility of making a sacrifice enters the conversation, Mike has to figure out how seriously he needs to take the rules before morning.
A Masterclass In Showing, Not Telling
I’m not necessarily a die-hard fan of folk horror outside the usual heavy hitters (and, of course, Nicolas Cage’s Wicker Man remake), but when I saw the title, read the synopsis, and saw the 84 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, I figured I’d give it a go. It’s clearly a low-budget film, meaning it leans heavily into dialogue to set the scene. This could be tricky for some filmmakers, but writer Richard Karpala and co-directors Gabriel Bienczycki and Richard Karpala play this really smart by never overexplaining everything.
They reveal a few very basic rules and introduce characters who are familiar with them, but outside of that, your guess is as good as mine. It’s not vague for the sake of being vague either. The stuff you need to know is explained through realistic conversation, not like a Stranger Things Season 5 “let’s bust out the chalkboard and spoonfeed it to the audience” kind of way. Even though this isn’t my preferred genre, I felt right at home because I felt trusted to put the pieces together myself.
Clocking in at just 80 minutes, Falling Stars is a tight and tense little indie effort that doesn’t patronize its audience while simultaneously allowing them to simply live in the world that has been established. There’s no instruction manual or deep-lore dump required because we’re watching people who know this world live in it, make the decisions they make, and deal with the consequences. There are enough context clues to pick up what they’re throwing down, and that’s all you really need for a simple idea to become an excellent movie.
As of this writing, Falling Stars is streaming for free on Tubi.
