In short: Something in the Dirt (2022)

Levi (Justin Benson), a guy with no social life whatsoever, has just moved into an old apartment building in Los Angeles, into an apartment that has stood empty for years. His neighbour John (Aaron Moorhead) doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d become his friend, but after they observe a curious light phenomenon – and possibly some freaky shit with the local gravity – they decide to team up to shoot a documentary about whatever the hell is going on. John’s attempts to explain the High Strangeness become increasingly byzantine and conspiratorial, while Levi just lets himself get dragged along.

This movie is what happens when house favourite filmmakers Benson & Moorhead get antsy during lockdown. They get a script and a couple of friends together and simply make a movie that’s small in scope but big on everything else, a thing full of little twists and suggestions, intelligent as well as clever ideas.

It’s actually rather complicated to describe the film properly, really, for it is at once an odd couple buddy movie with sinister elements, a meditation on the lure of the strange and the conspiratorial, a meta movie about filmmaking and morality and a serious character portrait of the friendship (or not) and betrayal between two very differently fucked up men. It is also probably one of the most genuinely capital W Weird movies around, finding its Weirdness in the modern folklore around High Strangeness while also criticizing the trajectory too much of this kind of folklore takes these days.

Oh, and it’s also an LA movie, because why the hell not, and what’s stranger than that city?

Through some strange and improbable kind of alchemy – for once, I have little idea why any of this works as wonderfully as it does – all of these themes and elements come together into a film that is at once peculiar, personal, and speaking to more universal things. This little wonder was made on enthusiasm and friendship, yet still looks pretty damn fantastic. It is edited and structured like an intricate multi-level puzzle that includes the counter-arguments to its theses, puts ambiguities and precision exactly where they are needed, while grounding its ideas and high concepts in a believably portrayed, complex humanity. It’s also pretty funny.

That all of this is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea is quite obvious, but going by the filmmakers’ body of work, it’s really not supposed to. To me, Something in the Dirt feels rather like it was made with me as an ideal audience in mind, which doesn’t happen every week.

Three Films Make A Post: If the storm doesn't get you... they will

Crawl (2019): By now, I’ve decided the films of Alexandre Aja are a bit like those of Rob Zombie in that I’ll never like a single one of them. This one should actually be a bit of a winner: a father daughter duo trapped by a hurricane having to fight off an alligator sounds like actual claustrophobic fun. Alas, it’s an annoying father-daughter duo with exactly the father-daughter problems you’d find in a SyFy movie. Aja and/or the script also quickly get bored by having to come up with suspense scenes based on the minimalist set-up, so the one alligator soon turns into a swarm of alligators, and because Aja clearly can’t imagine not having any character to kill, we get ten minutes of alligators killing random people around our protagonists’ house. It’s really all very SyFy Original, just with a higher budget and for some reason having found its way into a cinema near me; it’s also a middling at best SyFy Original without much to recommend it or even just remember it next week.

The Black String (2018): I actually enjoyed Brian Hanson’s much more low-market film about a guy (Frankie Muniz) with a history of psychological problems either starting to suffer from a witch’s curse or losing it after a one-night stand a lot more. Hanson is really good at dragging Muniz’s experiences to the border of the ridiculous and illogical, making the viewer increasingly uncomfortable with the protagonist but also evoking sympathy and empathy for his plight, be it imagined or not, while still having him act increasingly erratic and threatening to himself and others.

Also highly commendable is how well the film fits typical tropes of Fortean High Strangeness into its plot, and how dubious and slightly cracked anyone who believes our protagonist is. It’s all highly ambiguous, until the film ends on a note that washes all ambiguity away without needing to go for a twist ending.

The Endless (2017): I liked the previous films by director/writer and sometimes actor duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead a lot, and The Endless, which tells the story of two brothers returning to the cult they grew up in – a tale that also happens to intersect with the duo’s first movie Resolution in surprising and pretty damn cool ways – is another winner. I’m particularly happy with the directors’ ability to fuse the cosmically weird, the humanly weird and the naturalistically mundane without ever letting any one perspective overwhelm the rest of the film.


The pace is leisurely, but it’s the kind of slowness that follows the need of the story the film tells and the world it takes place in – this is one of those films where every shot takes on multiple functions in world building, character building or mood building without ever making things feel too constructed or overloaded. It’s a thing of beauty, really.

In short: Spring (2014)

Following the cancer death of his mother and a handful of fuck-ups, Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) flees from his native US into a random direction – Italy, as it happens. There, he drifts to a town in Apulia, finds (illegal) work with a farmer, and meets and falls in love with Louise (Nadia Hilker). Louise reciprocates his feelings but she has secrets of the dark, ancient and strange kind that can become quite the problem in a relationship.

For the second time, I find myself very much excited about/by a film directed by the duo of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead yet also very unwilling to actually write too much about the brilliant film I’m so excited about. It’s not so much the fear of spoiling plot points for my – possibly fictional anyway – readership, for this isn’t a film going for the big twist, in fact one putting its cards quite clearly on the table, but of spoiling that perfect moment of coming into a film like this without too much baggage, and me not wanting to get in the way of anyone just watching the film and letting it unfold.

So, I’m just going to say I think Spring is as perfect a movie as I’ve encountered, a romance with fantasy and horror elements (that one of the main characters would most certainly rather call science fiction, and oh how I love the film for which of the two it is) with wonderful acting by Pucci, Hilker and Francesco Carnelutti, directed in a style that starts out as your typical indie realism yet becomes increasingly poetic in simple yet decidedly poetic ways.

Thematically, Spring concerns itself very much with those things you’d expect of a film with a title like this that sends a young man to Italy - love and decay, death and rebirth, loss and finiteness and love again, treating its themes with clarity, humanity, a feeling of sadness and a feeling of joy, as it should be.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,justin benson,aaron moorhead,fantasy,romance,nadia hilker,lou taylor pucci

In short: Resolution (2012)

Warning: unbearable coyness ahead

Mike (Peter Cilella) has been emailed a video of the psychotic breakdown of his meth-addicted best friend Chris (Vinny Curran), who spends his life slowly, and very consciously, killing himself way out in the boons. Mike drives out there to make one last attempt to convince Chris to go into rehab.

When Chris declines, Mike tasers him and cuffs him as the starting point for a one-week cold turkey (because that sort of thing helps so well with drug addiction). But stranger and stranger things begin happening around the two.

Justin Benson's and Aaron Moorhead's Resolution is one of these movies putting a rather large problem in front of me, since really getting into its most interesting aspects will do more than just spoil a plot (and who cares about plot?), it will ruin the wonderful unpredictability of the story. While I’m not afraid of spoilers, that would be too much of a shame for me to take responsibility for concerning a film very much about stories. It's particularly irksome in this case because really everything that's great about the film (except perhaps the fine acting) is really bound up in the things I won't talk about.

So this is one of these place holder write-ups where I coyly tell you how great a film is, and that everyone interested in a film in the same vein as modern weird fiction (in the sense of say, the Vandermeers' The Weird anthology) should watch it, but won't ever come out with what exactly is so great about the film. On the other hand, I'm not writing about movies to ruin them, so this will have to do.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,american movies,horror,justin benson,aaron moorhead,peter cilella,vinny curran