Hide Your Smiling Faces review

Rustling trees, snakes eating fish, ambient score... His opening gambits alone share territory with other rustic reveries on innocence/experience, but Daniel Patrick Carbone’s visual poetry and ease with young actors distinguish his no-budget US indie debut. Providing the magnetic counter-balance for the plot’s drift, Ryan Jones and Nathan Varnson give natural performances as small-town brothers rocked by a friend’s death.

The Malick echoes and half-cocked shots at tension-building seem more forced, but Carbone’s sense of place, management of mood and feel for loaded intimacies all suggest his intuitive talent won’t stay hidden.