Anchorage is a 2023 drama directed by Scott Monahan and written by Dakota Loesch. They also star as the main characters in this independent drama about a drug-addled American Dream gone terribly wrong. With empathy and a style that makes the most out of its limited scope, Loesch and Monahan have crafted a little indie gem. It’s a story about brothers on the road in a world that appears abandoned and left to rot and which, despite its scale, is a Biblical story about the corruption of a family. Anchorage had its world premiere at the Stony Brook Film Festival in New York in 2021.
Anchorage (2023) Movie Summary & Plot Synopsis:
John and Jacob are two brothers from Florida. John is the elder one, ambitious, reckless, and hot-headed, and he cares a lot for his brother. Jacob, the younger one, is a relatively nervous figure, though a lot more pragmatic than his brother. They have lost their mother, perhaps recently, and this troubles both of them, especially Jacob, who always has fever dreams about his brother’s violence and his mother. They are addicted to opioids and have recently stolen 3600 pills from an undisclosed place along the East Coast and plan to sell them to make a fortune. For that purpose, they have stuffed these pills into packets and hidden them inside teddy bears that now crowd the trunk of their car.
When the movie begins, the two have been on the road for a week and are now somewhere in the Californian desert. They are driving to Anchorage, Alaska, where John believes that given the lack of narcotics supply, they can make as much as $250 per pill, bringing them close to a million dollars given their stash. This is based entirely on a friend’s anecdote, so the information isn’t exactly trustworthy. John, though, is a dreamer, and he believes this is a chance worth taking to leave their impoverished lives behind. Jacob, who feels a more achievable target would be to sell their stuff in Los Angeles for exponentially less but still, a large sum of money, gets scoffed at by John.
On the road, the two spend their days driving, drinking, smoking, and constantly getting high from their stash. At night, they squat in vacant, dilapidated, graffiti-ridden houses of which there’s no shortage, and in the morning, they leave for new pastures. One morning, after a major high, Jacob wakes up to find John and his car missing. He goes out to look for them and finds John getting beaten up by two strangers. Without thinking, Jacob pulls out a baseball bat from the trunk of the car and assaults the two of them from behind to save John. This doesn’t please him as he does not wish to be protected by his younger sibling or have his ways questioned, especially when he is trying to make a quick buck by selling their stash.
Jacob starts to get overly suspicious because of his violent act. He has bleached blue hair, which makes him easily recognizable. Hence, he is worried that the two might be searching for them to exact revenge. The paranoia starts to distance him from his hedonistic brother, who simply wants to live in the moment, and his dreams begin to worsen.
What happens with the Deputy Sheriff?
After Jacob decides that they’re wasting too much time lazing around instead of reaching their destination, John begrudgingly agrees to continue their journey through the night. On the highway, a Deputy Sheriff’s car stops them. The man turns out to be a friendly one, though, especially since Jacob acts like the two of them are deeply religious, Church-going Christians. So, he lets the two of them go.
But before they can drive off, John leaves the car with his gun and shoots the Deputy Sheriff dead off-screen. John’s disgust with Jacob’s recent behavior climaxes here. He believes Jacob made a serious mistake by telling the Deputy Sheriff that they were headed to Anchorage and showing them his driver’s license. For John, Jacob’s actions jeopardized their future as drug dealers. Hence, he had to kill the Deputy Sheriff to prevent them from getting tracked once they set up shop in Alaska.
Anchorage (2023) Movie Ending Explained:
Why does Jacob kill John?
The morning after the murder, Jacob leaves the car for a moment when John decides to get out and bully him. Jacob, whose spontaneously violent tendencies we had already gotten a glimpse of during the scuffle with the two strangers, ends up killing his brother with a rock. It’s a culmination of the frustration that had been building for a while owing to John’s recklessness. He was trying to sell opiates to unreliable figures, shoplifting, consuming way too much from their stash, and losing his temper too often.
The murder of the Deputy Sheriff was concrete proof of his derangement. John reminding Jacob that the blame for the murder is on the both of them as they are brothers, fuelled Jacob’s mounting paranoia. So, he had to kill John after he attacked him because it was clear to him that otherwise, John would have probably done the same to him soon or something careless that would risk their future.
He drags John’s body into what appears to be some kind of broken, abandoned embankment and leaves him in there, away from the open. Jacob does this as a way of giving John a burial and also to not leave the corpse for a passerby to discover. After he’s done, he changes out of the blood-soaked clothes and gets into the car. He doesn’t throw away John’s gun and simply looks at the teddy bears once, which means that he is probably going to continue driving to Alaska.
If not, he’ll sell it along the way and keep all the money for himself. It isn’t that he killed John remorselessly; in the film’s final moments, his memory of the two of them drinking and having fun is intercut with a heartfelt eulogy he delivered for John when they were play-acting those for each other.
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