Ballast

The opening half hour is electrifying, the ending interestingly open-ended...

Quite a debut here from writer-director Lance Hammer, working on a minuscule budget in the Mississippi Delta, and evoking a memorably forlorn kind of regional specificity.

A difficult, subdued film, but intelligent and with more intricacy and subtlety than at first appears.

The storyline is direct and the characters well-sketched. The film revolves around the impact of a suicide on the family of a convenience store owner.