"Hesperia" lured me in with the cool movie poster of what looked like a desperate kid in the middle of the desert, only lit by headlights. The film's succinct logline is quite straightforward -- "In a small desert town a home invasion goes terribly wrong" -- but the film is about more than that. Hesperia follows an ensemble of troubled characters out in a small desert town, from kids to tweakers to dealers, as a gritty and raw plot unfolds. The film grapples with some of the grim realities of these types of people and the film gives off an authentic sense of realism. I was a big fan of the cinematic desert filming locations in the film in particular. When I watch indie films I'm not always looking for the biggest production value or a million dollar budget, rather I'm looking for creativity and originality and Hesperia had that. I'd recommend checking this one out.

Hesperia is a small town located in California's Mojave Desert, and an apt setting for director Steve Helgoth's shrewdly executed small town crime drama of the same name.

In the film's log line we're told that, "In a small desert town, a home invasion goes terribly wrong." That sound bite alone does indeed reveal the groundwork for the film's confluence of events, as Hesperia deals with an overlap of disparate dark side incidents both occurring at the same place and at the same time. It's a very cool premise, and one that's appropriately given the small town treatment in full, from the film's intense nocturnal darkness so indicative of desert living, to the hopelessness some of its very intentionally detached characters, and extended yet further by the internally isolated vibe of much of the quietly-paced dialogue.

For those of us old enough to remember, the crime of "home invasion" was once not differentiated from the wider nomenclature of "breaking and entering." The advent of "home invasion" brought with it the evocation of a direct and specific psychological fear already shared by so many. Helgoth leverages our terrifying associations we hold around this crime and employs it as Hesperia's primary psychological driver, but not without borrowing storytelling elements that have been effectively fueling genres like horror and drama since the onset of the moving pictures industry. In allowing itself to be influenced by the best of all of these worlds, Hesperia becomes an ambitiously executed and highly engrossing indie film.

Two kids in Hesperia get exposed to the dark side of their community. This raw, indie film depicts the gripping and disturbing results of a vicious cycle. To learn more, watch it. Warning... it's not for everybody.