PACIFIC AGGRESSION is first and foremost a smart film, a well-researched film that engages articulately both metaphorically and literally with the history of place and history of cultural violence, the history of how people just going about their lives contribute to and move these aggressions forward. Filmmaker Shaun Scott shows our digital age of loneliness not as something new, but as something we have always been working (against ourselves) towards. And he shows all of this through the communicationally challenged, yet budding relationship between main characters Frank Ulysses Waters (played by Trevor Marston) and Meryl Applegate (played by Libby Matthews, definitively the film’s emotional and performative anchor), and through the attending and complementing stock footage and historical details. Whether focusing on the allegory of naming used in this film, or the cartoonish—almost throw-back 60s style—animation of technology, or the way the cowboy & Indian movies threaded throughout are suddenly elevated to multiple levels of metaphor when watched by both main characters together (a white dude and a woman of Native heritage), this is a film bursting with humanity, intelligence, and (mostly subtle) politics.

Frank Waters is a successful one-book author, a Luddite disaffected with contemporary modes of communication. His editor wants him to blog the Pacific Northwest and Meryl just wants him to text her back; he wants to write letters (the ridiculousness of this outdated mode further exemplified by delivery of his letter to Meryl to the distant mailbox of Mailbox Peak). Meryl Applegate is a technology-addicted college student overly attached to her smartphone and enamored of the author she spent two days with two years ago and has internet-stalked ever since. “I know everything about you,” Meryl tells Frank. “And you didn’t tell me any of it.”

Structurally the film works on a loosely bipartite architecture. The first half we are more closely aligned with Frank’s experience; the second half is Meryl’s. The first half the couple are apart; the second half together. What bears closer examination than the space this review allows is how these two halves hinge on an intense and wordless (but for the talk radio) moment of intimacy we experience with one of the minor characters (Meryl’s therapist, Dr. Lauren Caligari, played by Marya Sea Kaminski). It is arguably the most intense moment of the film.

Occasionally in the first half of PACIFIC AGGRESSION, there are a few lines of dialogue and voiceover that come across as overly strident or leading, trying hard to convince the viewer of something he or she is already along the ride for. And while the main character is unconvincingly alcoholic (Frank is regularly shown dragging soberly on his flask), these are the only real criticisms of this low-budget film this viewer deems worth discussing. Where this film succeeds greatly, more greatly than many big-budget endeavors, is its use of music, both diegetic and exegetic, and the film’s visual elements, both compositionally (each frame could stand on its own as a well-composed photograph) and in moments of montage. The montages—where old news and science reels of atomic tests are cut together with Westerns and other surprising images—reveal a true artist’s eye and an expert storyteller’s ability to manipulate viewer experience through visual juxtaposition. These were the moments that elevated this film to its phenomenal potential.