User Reviews

This is what filmmaking and storytelling is all about.

A gritty and beautiful journey that makes an impression, Sean Daniel Bauer's El Camino is a well crafted film that I highly recommend! Also, you won't want to miss this performance by David Ty Reza as Miguel. He's the kind of actor you know you'll see again in Hollywood.

Here is the review written by CinemaKick after an early screening:

"As El Camino begins, we are quickly introduced to a thrilling, beautiful hell. For a quick moment, we linger in a dream – wind-chimes signal refreshing breezes, a sketchbook eerily floats up out of a crashing surf – but writer/director Sean Daniel Bauer doesn't let us stay in this halcyon headspace long. As we move from an impressionistic introduction into the gritty narrative story of Miguel (David Ty Reza), a recovering crystal meth addict trying to find his sea legs in a tumultuous sober culture, it's clear that El Camino has aims to make its viewers reassess their emotional reactions to the film with schizophrenic frequency.

There's a moment early in El Camino where Miguel returns to his nana's home as a shamed prodigal son, his sins and misdeeds stemming from drugs and money and loose women creating an all-too-obvious roadblock to any relationship reconstruction his grandmother could find in her heart to instigate. It's a simple, almost childlike scene, one that has its performers underplay their sentimental dialogue with disarming frankness. Moments later, though, Miguel has a vulgar and unsettling run-in with a nude woman of dubious trustworthiness that evokes a vitriolic sense of danger within our protagonist's new world: there is grace and interpersonal connection to be found here, but also deep danger, a terrifying inability to keep demons of sexuality and addiction locked in the shadows.

It's in sequences like these that El Camino shines brightest. Unafraid to zigzag from lovemaking to antagonistic verbal exchanges rife with potential for violent danger to action-filled moments accompanied by easy-funk music that would fit snugly into any outlandishly foxy blaxploitation movie, this is a film that all but dares you to get comfortable. As is the case for the lived-in, compellingly flawed characters El Camino follows, Bauer and his team demand their audience journey through the rigors of Miguel's attempt at reconciliation with society, which (of course) is a bumpy ride.

But if El Camino is purposely jagged in parts, as a narrative technique, it allows for moments of exceptional emotional release. In a scene that on paper should read like a cheesy excerpt from an Afterschool Special, Miguel attends a job fair (dressed with ragtag flair in an ill-fitting borrowed brown suit) and runs into a woman who never thought she'd have a chance to meet Miguel again. I'll keep the spoilers at a minimum, but it turns out these two shared an experience in the past that links their histories implicitly, and in a wide-eyed, surreal exchange, Miguel realizes that karma might just not kick him to the brink of suicide after all. There's a straightforward, earnest glow to this sequence, one that makes the terrors we saw unfold just a few minutes earlier seem like a distant memory.

Bauer's is not a simple film, nor is it one that it is happy sticking to a traditional storytelling style. We flash forward and backward in time, characters we gullibly assume are safe and unthreatened are forced to run the gauntlet, and Miguel's attempt to reconstruct his shattered life (the major character arc of the movie) is a minefield littered with surprise dramatic turns. El Camino is impulsive and mercurial, a chronicle of pain and loss that somehow defies the darkness within its subject matter and offers a stark, fragile, all too human beauty." –Mike Restaino, CinemaKick