An adolescent boy takes a breather from a paintball game to talk to an unseen filmmaker. What is he doing tomorrow? Going to a funeral. Whose? His brother’s. Oh.
A quietly wrenching art film shot like a documentary, “Putty Hill” is a deeply felt evocation of a place and a people by writer-director Matt Porterfield, who set this largely improvised film in his own lower-class Baltimore neighborhood.
Recalling both the matter-of-fact bleakness of “Kids” and the creepy harshness of “Winter’s Bone,” the movie is a stark blast of realism. Relatives and friends of the dead man, destroyed by a drug overdose at age 24, try to grasp onto something they can retain or understand, to no avail.
His grandmother simply refuses to attend the funeral, saying she prefers to remember happier things, as she watches a sitcom. Two girls who knew him well drive to his house in the night, but find only empty rooms and the remnants of despondency.
We’re not really surprised; the trashy void and the blank faces we’ve seen throughout are all we need to know about this brief, unhappy life.
“Putty Hill” doesn’t tell a story as such, but in its coarse banality there is a strange eloquence.