Neil Breen’s New Sci-Fi Thriller Delivers A Message Too Powerful For Film

By Robert Scucci
| Published 9 seconds ago

In every single one of his movies, Neil Breen portrays a tragic hero with godlike powers who takes it upon himself to save the world from itself through mystical, inexplicable abilities that more often than not make no sense. 2016’s Pass Thru clings to this formula and makes for an entertaining watch for fans of outsider filmmaking.

While most Breeniacs like myself would point to 2005’s Double Down and 2012’s Fateful Findings as his finest works, Pass Thru is not without its charm. But be warned, because it’s also one of Breen’s most disjointed pieces in his entire filmography, and that’s saying a lot.

“The message is simply too powerful to be captured on film.”

Here, we have an ominous floating red dot that serves no real purpose, a tiger that occasionally shows up in the Nevada desert for reasons never explained, and cans of beans littering the landscape. Corrupt insurance, bank, and media “presidents” openly lay out their plans to be corrupt and immoral, but Neil Breen’s Thgil (light spelled backwards), an extraterrestrial AI lifeform sent to Earth to make it a better place, is here to save the day.

It’s No Double Down, But We’ll Take It

Like most Breen joints, Pass Thru is rife with sprawling desert shots, ramshackle sound design, and preachy monologues about the state of the world and how Neil Breen, wearing his finest Canadian tuxedo, is the only being in existence who can usher in a new age of enlightenment. Self-satisfaction aside, we get a mess of a story that begins with a group of nameless immigrants packed into the back of a truck and carted off to an undisclosed location by enforcers who are supposed to round them up and send them back to the countries they escaped from.

Through Breen’s narrations, we learn that he’s an AI lifeform from a far-off galaxy sent to Earth specifically to eliminate 300 million “bad people” through a great cleansing. The problem is that in his human form, he becomes a heroin addict who sleeps in garbage when he’s not eating canned food in his trailer home. He befriends Amanda (Kathy Corpus) and her niece, Kim (Chaize Macklin), who are reluctant to stay with him in his trailer even though he claims to be “the future,” after thoroughly rounding up his garbage to make his home more welcoming.

Meanwhile, a boy astronomer (Abraham Rodriguez), two girl astronomers (Taylor Sydney and Taylor Johnson), and their wheelchair-bound professor (James D. Smith) head out to the desert in search of a glowing red dot that looks like a broken pixel on your screen, but appears with purpose despite that purpose never being properly spelled out.

Somehow, all of these separate storylines converge when Thgil takes over a news broadcast to let the entire human race know how primitive they are, and again when he shows up at a mansion to tell various government officials and industry presidents that they’re corrupt. Shortly thereafter, CGI explosions burn in the background as Neil Breen walks away from the wreckage without ever looking back.

Not One Of The Classics, But A Departure Point

While Pass Thru is distinctly a Neil Breen film, it pales in comparison to its predecessor, Fateful Findings. That film is rooted in corporate espionage, government secrets, and dozens of laptops getting destroyed as our hero vows to expose the corruption running rampant in this world.

All the same trappings of self-importance and disgust with the modern world are still there, but Pass Thru fails to stick the landing because there are simply too many moving parts. For a film that people like me actively seek out because it’s so laughably terrible in every conceivable way, there’s a distinct lack of charm here, and I can’t quite put my finger on what’s missing.

If Neil Breen were a musician, Pass Thru would be his departure album. He’s been to the desert and to far-off galaxies by bending space and time as we know it on multiple occasions. This is the last film he shoots primarily on location before becoming a master of the green screen with films like Twisted Pair and Cade: The Tortured Crossing, so what we’re seeing here feels like an artificially intelligent being struggling to reach his final form through conventional means. The message is simply too powerful to be captured on film. At least that’s the narrative I’m going with. 

If you’re a fan of Neil Breen’s work, Pass Thru is essential viewing. Just know that it’s not his finest hour. To witness what Breen calls a “visionary, revolutionary film which pushes the human species to the limits of controversial, thought-provoking actions,” you can learn more about it on his website.