Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Gold’ on Hulu, a Survivalist Saga in Which Zac Efron Rots Away In Front of Our Very Eyes

Nothing screams “filmed during COVID” like Gold (now on Hulu), a survival thriller shot in Australia that puts Zac Efron in the desert all by himself, making him dirtier and uglier as he endures the harsh elements. Which is funny, because Efron is a noted Handsome Man, and also disgusting, because there are stretches of the movie where we’re perilously close to watching the poor guy’s skin blister in the sun in real time. Also funny is how this grim, grim movie is a production of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, even though it felt more like sulfuric acid for the soul. Fun, it ain’t.

GOLD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Title card that comes a bit after the Chicken Soup for the Soul logo card: SOME TIME, SOME PLACE, NOT FAR FROM NOW. It maybe should read “NOT LONG FROM NOW, because “FAR” implies distance, not time. It’s like how “farther” applies strictly to distance and “further” is something that can’t be measured, but if it said “NOT FUR FROM NOW” that’d just be silly. Funny, the things you think about when you should be thinking about the movie in front of you, especially when that movie ain’t so hot.

Anyway, it seems as if someone blew up the world, or part of it, but who knows for sure? We see vultures, a rusty old train chugging along, and Efron’s scarred, dirty face slow-chewing some bread. Miserable bread. He gets up and gives the rest of the miserable bread to a miserable baby and its miserable mom and hops off the Miserable Express. The surroundings are bleached-out and dusty, the kind of reality where you wonder how many decades it’s been since bathing was outlawed – y’know, nobody’s been clean since nineteen-dickety-two. Or maybe it’s just Australia rimshot! He limps over to a grubby, grubby man who’s watching a functioning TV, and he doesn’t say much except where the shitter is. And if you thought the bread and the train and the mom and the baby were miserable, wait’ll you see the shantytown stinkhole of an outhouse. It looks lifted straight off the grounds of Woodstock ’99.

Our guy – we’re never given a name – gets a ride. He’s headed to a place called the Compound, for a job or something. I dunno, a lot of this is purposely vague. He gets a ride from another guy (Anthony Hayes, who also directs and co-writes) whose name also is a seed that finds no purchase in this script. It’s 200 whatevers (the currency type is somewhere in the discard pile with the proper nouns) for the ride and another 100 for gas. One would think 200 for a ride implies that gas is included, and our guy brings that up, but the other guy says that’s the way it is, take it or leave it and our guy takes it. One gets the sense that our guy doesn’t have much fight in him anymore.

It’s a long drive through an oppressively barren desert to the Compound, long enough to require campouts. The chilly conversation between our guy and the other guy warms a little over the fire, which keeps the wild dogs at bay. The other guy asks our guy about the scar on his face, but our guy doesn’t wanna talk about that. They wake the next morning and while our guy walks yonder to piss in the dust, he spots something shiny. Gold. A chunk of gold. A massive chunk, it turns out, so big they dig and dig and dig around it and can’t shake it loose. The other guy has an idea: One guy sits with the gold and the other guy goes back to civilization to get a backhoe. Then they’ll dig the f—er out and be rich. Our guy says he’ll stay and the other guy drives off. He’ll be back in a couple of days, and all our guy has to do is sit tight and not lose his noodle. Easier said than done!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The setting makes The Road look like a tiptoe through the tulips. There’s a scene in which our guy talks to a scorpion, who I named Bilson. I’m pretty sure the guys took a left into the brown part of the landscape and traveled a few hundred clicks past Mad Max’s desiccated husk. I also recalled the James Franco-cuts-his-own-arm-off movie 127 Hours and the Ryan Reynolds-stuck-in-a-coffin-for-the-whole-movie movie Buried.

Performance Worth Watching: Efron is the only person on screen for 75, maybe 80 percent of the movie, and while I’m not sure it’s wholly worth watching, if you’re watching the movie, you have no choice but to be watching his performance. It’s a perfectly acceptable performance, although the screenplay’s purposeful abstraction and spare-parable qualities dominate over character, severely handicapping our emotional involvement in our guy’s survival.

Memorable Dialogue: The other guy’s advice to our guy about spending a couple days alone in the desert: “Keep your head on, you’ll be fine.”

Sex and Skin: None. Not enough moisture to facilitate either lubrication or completion.

Our Take: Efron is caught between a rock and a hard place, or, apropos for the setting, between the blazing hot sun and the dry, dry ground, drier than a big ol’ bowl of milkless Cheerios. The sparse screenplay leaves Efron to imply things about his character, which leaves us trying to infer things about the things he’s implying; it’s like being in a pitch dark room with the plug for a lamp, and blindly poking around trying to find the electrical outlet. Our guy has clearly Been Through Things, what with his physical attributes and a certain hopeless look in his eye, a hopeless look that brightens somewhat with the prospect of cashing in that hunk of metal. And so the story becomes less about what the character may or may not deserve, more about the folly of greed.

One scene in Gold, the conversation in which the two guys decide who’s staying and who’s going, is compelling in its nuance, prompting us to question whether it’s earnest or manipulative. Beyond that, the movie asserts that no one, except maybe Hitler, deserves what happens to our guy, who physically rots in front of our very eyes: Grotesque blisters materialize on his skin and oozing sores open up to be caked with dust and probed by omnipresent flies. In the late stages of the film, Hayes photographs Efron with lighting, angles and makeup rendering him unrecognizable, utterly alien, and thoroughly repugnant.

There are some Developments, because otherwise it’s just Efron and his occasional buddy, the scorpion, hanging out and making us appreciate the comfort of our seats in climate-controlled surroundings. I laughed during a scene in which our guy tries in vain to poop in the sand and, with impeccable timing, his surprisingly functional satellite phone rings; ain’t it always the way? Otherwise, the wild dogs circle him, occasionally devouring their own, and this film is occasionally artful, but mostly mirthless and ugly and hopeless.

Our Call: In case I haven’t made it entirely clear, Gold is no fun whatsoever. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream Gold