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.

After Midnight (2019)

Abby (Brea Grant), the life and work partner of small town bar owner Hank (Jeremy Gardner, who also co-directs), suddenly disappears from their house, leaving behind a note that’s too vague for a goodbye note but also not exactly promising a quick return. Hank loses himself in memories of better times, when things between the couple were simple because they were young and very acutely in love, so problem fields we’ll learn about later like Abby’s hatred of small town life and Hank’s own troubles with change and making decisions about his life didn’t really come up.

His bout of depression isn’t the only thing haunting Hank right now, though, for ever since Abby went away, he has had nightly visits by some kind of creature that wants to get into his – as is traditional – middle-of-nowhere house and clearly wants to do him harm. Not surprisingly, nobody in town believes any of Hank’s wild tales about the creature, so he has to try to fight it off alone, increasingly losing his grip on his sanity while doing so. How that’s going to turn out if and when Abby should return, and what will all of this do to their relationship?

For the longest time, I wasn’t at all sure about Jeremy Gardner’s and Christian Stella’s horror and romance movie After Midnight, feeling rather sceptical that the leisurely pace would ever let the film arrive at anything amounting to a point, and not too keen on watching yet another guy in a movie having very much self-caused relationship troubles, with a monster that only seemed to be in there to be a somewhat strained metaphor. Slowly, though, I began to appreciate how well, and sometimes funnily, the film drew Hank and his world, how elegantly the directors already implicated all the things that would become Abby’s and Hank’s relationship troubles in Hank’s happy flashbacks, just without Hank and the audience noticing at the time.

Once Abby returns, the film very much proves that all of what came before did indeed have a point, with some wonderful dialogue scenes now talking about the difficulties of love and relationships once the endorphin-driven parts of it are over and the parts start that can be rather a lot like work, Grant and Gardner doing great jobs keeping this believable, lively and real. Here, the film isn’t making the classic mistake of making one of the two the asshole of the relationship, even though it is clearly Hank who has to change if he wants to continue with Abby, instead working on letting the audience understand where each one is coming from; very atypical for a film from the last couple of years, it’s not about judgement and who is in the wrong but about what kind of compromise is viable for these two to stay together.

After that, the film makes utterly lovely use of a standard romance trope in an awkward family dinner scene that had me smiling like a loon, adds the perfect jump scare, and ends in a way that makes it impossible not to realize that the early film’s lengths were indeed in there for a reason, slowly preparing the ground for the rest of the film and trusting in the audience to be patient and have a bit of trust.


In the end, After Midnight, turns out to be the best horror/romance combo since Benson and Moorhead’s Spring (another film that takes a bit of time preparing the viewer). And wouldn’t you know it, those guys produced this film, Benson also taking an acting turn as Abby’s somewhat asshat-ish sheriff brother. That’s the perfect company for what turns out to be a quietly excellent little movie.

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.

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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