Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed U.S. city, the horror film “Hypochondriac” features a cast of white, Latino and African American characters representing the working-class middle-class.
Culture Clash: A pottery maker is haunted by his traumatic childhood in ways that begin to affect his relationship with his boyfriend.
Culture Audience: “Hypochondriac” will appeal primarily to people in horror movies that explore themes of mental illness and generational trauma.
Zach Villa in “Hypochondriac” (Photo by Dustin Supencheck/XYZ Films)
Although it can get a little repetitive, “Hypochondriac” skillfully shows the blurred lines between psychological horror and mental illness. The movie’s plot is fairly simple, but the striking and often horrifying visuals in the movie will leave an impact. “Hypochondriac” is the feature-film debut of writer/director Addison Heimann, who shows promise as a filmmaker who can craft stories and characters that hold people’s interest. “Hypochondriac” had its world premiere at the 2022 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival.
In “Hypochondriac,” which takes place in an unnamed U.S. city, the opening scene shows a mentally ill woman (played by Marlene Forte) having paranoid delusions in her home. She looks frantically out of the window, because she thinks people are out to get her. And then, this unnamed mother turns hostile toward her only child—a 12-year-old son named Will (played by Ian Inigo)—and she accuses him of “being in collusion with them.” After Will denies her accusation, she does something horrifying: She tries to kill him by strangling him.
Later, another incident that’s not shown in the movie involves this mother, a knife and a lot of blood in the house’s kitchen. Viewers find out that this incident is the one that caused the mother to be sent to a psychiatric facility. Will’s unnamed father (played by Chris Doubek) tells Will that Will’s mother has been taken away to get psychiatric help, and he orders Will to not look in the kitchen until it can be cleaned up. But, of course, Will does look in the kitchen. And he sees that it’s a blood-splattered mess.
“Hypochondriac” then fast-forwards 18 years later. Will (played by Zach Villa), who is openly gay, is now a pottery maker for a small company that caters to upscale clients. He seems to be fairly happy, and he has settled into a loving relationship with his boyfriend Luke (played by Devon Graye), who is as laid-back as Will is neurotic. Will and Luke (who is an AIDS counselor) have been dating each other for the past eight months.
Will has been guarded with Luke about his past. But things happen in the movie that cause Will to open up to Luke about the childhood trauma that still haunts him. Will also has a co-worker named Sasha (played by Yumarie Morales), who is a sassy friend, but she has her own personal struggles too. There’s a scene in the movie where Sasha has a panic attack, and Will helps her get through it.
It isn’t long before Will’s seemingly stable life starts to unravel. He gets mysterious headaches. Then he seems to be having random fainting spells. Throughout the story, Will visits a series of clinic doctors and other medical professionals, who can’t find anything that’s physically wrong with him. Michael Cassidy has a satirical cameo role as a nurse practitioner named Chaz, who insists on being called “NP Chaz” and who gives off-the-cuff, incompetent diagnoses.
Will also starts getting phone calls from his mother, whom he does not want to hear from at all. His mother repeatedly warns him not to trust Luke. She also leaves a lot of rambling messages on Will’s voice mail. And there are recurring visions of someone dressed in a wolf costume that have to do with Will’s Halloween memories from when he was a child.
It’s very easy to tell at a certain point in the movie how much is reality and how much is a hallucination. Thanks largely to Villa’s riveting performance and the engrossing direction of the movie, the entire journey of “Hypochondriac” is a harrowing ride that takes viewers into the mind of an increasingly disturbed person. “Hypochondriac” has an ending that might not satisfy some viewers, but it realistically shows how mental illness remains with people throughout their lives and isn’t like a nightmare that goes away when someone wakes up.
UPDATE: XYZ Films will release “Hypochondriac” in select U.S. cinemas on July 29, 2022. The movie will be released on digital and VOD on August 4, 2022.
Pictured clockwise, from top left: Y’lan Noel, Cleopatra Coleman, Lex Scott Davis, Shamier Anderson and Justin Hartley in “A Lot of Nothing” (Photo by John Keng)
Culture Representation: Taking place in Los Angeles, the comedy/drama film “A Lot of Nothing” features a racially diverse cast of characters (African American, white and some Asians) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: An African American husband and wife, who both work for the same law firm, kidnap and hold their white neighbor captive in their home after the spouses find out that he’s the cop who’s in the news for killing an unarmed young man.
Culture Audience: “A Lot of Nothing” will appeal mainly to people who think they are supporting a Black Lives Matter advocacy movie, but this horrendous misfire is anything but supportive of civil rights and positive portrayals of black people.
A complete tonal mess, the comedy/drama “A Lot of Nothing” makes a disgusting mockery of the Black Lives Matter movement and insults African American women the most. Apparently, the filmmakers think the best way for black people to fight racism is to become criminals and perpetuate racist stereotypes. If this trashy movie wanted to be a satire, it demolishes any credibility because it can’t decide if it wants to be an absurd farce or a serious thriller. Worst of all, it takes real-life trauma that families and other loved ones experience because of unjustified killings committed by cops, and uses this trauma as a gimmicky plot device, just so the filmmakers could get a cash grab out of this heinous movie. “A Lot of Nothing” had its world premiere at the 2022 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival.
The fact that “A Lot of Nothing” was directed by an African American (Mo McRae) does not excuse the utter depths of stupidity where this movie goes when it comes to exploiting these real-life tragedies. McRae wrote the abysmal screenplay for “A Lot of Nothing” with Sarah Kelly Kaplan. And they both seem to have particular contempt for black women, because of how black women are portrayed in this movie. That’s because out of all the dimwitted characters in “A Lot of Nothing,” the black women characters are the dumbest and the flakiest.
The moronic story of “A Lot of Nothing,” which takes place in Los Angeles, is that an African American married couple named James (played by Y’lan Noel) and Vanessa (played by Cleopatra Coleman)—who both work at the same law firm—kidnap and hold captive a white cop named Brian Stanley (played by Justin Hartley), who happens to be their next-door neighbor. Brian is divorced and lives alone, so there’s no one in his house who immediately notices that he’s missing when he’s kidnapped from his home. James is a lawyer, while Vanessa (who has an MBA degree) is some kind of business manager at the law firm.
What would cause this highly educated, upper-middle-class, respectable couple to commit such a drastic crime? Vanessa is angrily triggered because she saw on the news that Brian is under investigation for the shooting death of an unarmed, young adult man, who was killed during a traffic stop. Some of this incident was captured on video footage that went viral on the Internet and was shown on TV. Brian has been put on leave from his job, pending the investigation.
Before the kidnapping takes place, Vanessa rants to James in their home about how she’s tired of hearing about cops killing innocent black people. James tells Vanessa repeatedly that they need to hear all the facts of this case before they jump to conclusions. But that doesn’t stop Vanessa from obsessing over the idea that she needs to lecture and interrogate Brian about what happened, as if she’s a prosecutor questioning him during a trial. She marches over to Brian’s house and demands that he talk to her and explain what happened during the shooting. Brian doesn’t want to talk to her, but she insists.
As someone who’s married to a lawyer and as a business manager who works for a law firm, Vanessa should know that Brian is probably under an attorney’s orders not to talk about the investigation to anyone without an attorney present. As a black woman (and as a human being who should have common sense), Vanessa should also know how stupid it is to pick a fight with a cop who’s under investigation for shooting and killing an unarmed person. The filmmakers of “A Lot of Nothing” don’t care, because they want to make Vanessa the worst stereotype of an angry black woman.
Brian’s response to Vanessa’s hostile confrontation? He tells her: “As an officer of the law, I suggest you take your high yellow ass back to your nice little house and drop it.” That racist remark is enough for Vanessa to later go over to Brian’s house with a gun, while James is trying to smooth things over with Brian. Vanessa wants to provoke a racist cop, and apparently doesn’t care about making things worse, and possibly doing something that could get people killed.
Vanessa pulls a gun on Brian, forces him into the couple’s garage, and orders James to tie up Brian. James is shocked and horrified. At first, James objects to Vanessa’s unhinged actions, but then he reluctantly goes along with this idiotic abduction and the rest of the crimes that Vanessa wants to commit in the name of Black Lives Matter. In other words, the movie is saying that educated black people with no criminal records are actually irrational, violent criminals who’ll use any racial excuse to commit crimes, thereby embodying the worst stereotypes that racists have of black people.
Vanessa is such an obnoxious lunatic, she commits this cop kidnapping less than an hour before James’ brother Jamal (payed by Shamier Anderson) and his pregnant fiancée Candy (played by Lex Scott Davis) are due to arrive for a family dinner. Candy and Jamal show up, find out about the kidnapping, and participate in the crime too. Jamal turns into a thug, while Candy is an airhead who spouts a lot of New Age gibberish.
There’s really no point in describing this awful movie anymore, except to say that the movie’s writing and direction are trash; the pacing is erratic; and all the cast members’ performances get worse as the story goes down a steep slide into a putrid abyss of racial hatred that’s hell-bent on making black people look as bad as possible. The movie ends with a “reveal” that just makes everyone involved look even more insanely stupid, with no real consequences. “A Lot of Nothing” is really just a lot of nonsense and a worthless train wreck that should be avoided at all costs.
UPDATE: RLJE Films will release “A Lot of Nothing” in select U.S. cinemas and on VOD on February 3, 2023.
Culture Representation: Taking place in New York, California and Nevada, the documentary film “Sell/Buy/Date” features a racially diverse group of people (African American, white, Latino and Native American) from the working-class, middle-class and wealthy discussing American society’s attitudes and laws about sex workers.
Culture Clash: People offer different perspectives on whether or not certain types of sex work should be legal and what the repercussions would be if the laws changed.
Culture Audience: “Sell/Buy/Date” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching an unusual documentary about sex workers that blends comedy and the seriousness of hard-hitting issues.
In the very unique documentary “Sell/Buy/Date,” director Sarah Jones takes viewers on a personal journey exploring diverse perspectives of sex workers in America. The movie’s tonal shift from lighthearted to tragic is jarring but necessary. The first two-thirds of the film put more emphasis on Jones alternating between comedic sketches and interviews that she conducted with sex workers and celebrities. The last third of the film is when the documentary takes a much darker and more realistic turn, when sex workers talk about the exploitation and abuse that’s part of the sex industry, whether the sex work is legal or not.
“Sell/Buy/Date” is based on Jones’ one-woman stage show “Sell/Buy/Date,” which had a limited off-Broadway run in New York City in 2016 and a limited engagement in Los Angeles in 2018. In the stage show, Jones (who says she’s never been a sex worker) played various characters representing various perspectives of the sex industry. Jones is also known for her one-woman, off-Broadway show “Bridge & Tunnel,” which won a special Tony Award in 2006. Meryl Streep was an executive producer of “Bridge & Tunnel,” and Streep has the same title for the “Sell/Buy/Date” documentary.
In the “Sell/Buy/Date” stage show, Jones played 19 fictional characters of various races, ethnicities and genders. In real life, Jones (who usually identifies as African American and sometimes as biracial or multiracial) is the child of “an African American father and mother of mixed Euro-American and Caribbean descent,” according to Jones’ Wikipedia page. She calls herself a “woman of color” in the documentary.
In the “Sell/Buy/Date” documentary, Jones portrays four fictional characters: Lorraine, an outspoken 85-year-old white Jewish grandmother; Bella, an academic-minded white college sophomore, who’s majoring in sex-work studies and who’s “ashamed of her white privilege”; Nereida, a sassy half-Dominican, half-Puerto Rican advocate for female rights; and Rashid, a working-class African American man who’s an aspiring entrepreneur and who works as an Uber driver to pay his bills. The “Sell/Buy/Date” stage show also had fictional characters in the sex industry, but none of the play’s sex-worker characters are in the “Sell/Buy/Date” documentary, because Jones interviews real-life sex workers in the film.
Jones interviewed people in New York state (where Jones is based), California and Nevada. The interviewees range from sex workers to activists to people who are not in the sex industry but who know Jones personally. It’s clear from watching the tonal shift of the film that Jones started off thinking that the film was going to go one way, and it turned out going another way. “Sell/Buy/Date” had its world premiere at the 2022 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival.
The movie opens with a scene of Jones, Lorraine, Bella and Nereida gathered in Jones’ dressing room, as they talk about the “Sell/Buy/Date” stage show, which will soon close. It’s a comedy sketch where the four women discuss the controversy over the show, such as protestors and critics who call Jones and “Sell/Buy/Date” a “danger to women.” Nereida comments that with the “Sell/Buy/Date documentary, Jones was trying so hard to be the “wokest” to please everybody, the play has just ended up angering “everybody.” In a staged scene, Jones is seen getting criticism on social media for being a SWERF: Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist, which is a label that Jones says does not apply to her.
In a voiceover, Jones says of the “Sell/Buy/Date” characters that she created: “On stage, in my play, they help me share different sides of a topic that’s not often talked about in the sex industry.” As time goes on in the documentary, Jones eventually reveals that she’s created “Sell/Buy/Date” (the play and the movie) as a way to try to emotionally heal and come to terms with the death of her 18-year-old sister Naomi, whose drug addiction led to her becoming a sex worker. Jones doesn’t go into too many details about this tragedy in the movie, but she has said in media interviews that Naomi died at the start of Jones’ career in the entertainment industry.
Early on in the documentary, Jones mentions dreading the anniversary of Naomi’s death. She also talks about keeping Naomi’s journal for three years and being afraid to read it, although she eventually does read parts of the journal on camera in the documentary. It’s one of the best parts of the movie, when Jones is being herself and showing a very vulnerable side to her, instead of playing characters to get some laughs.
Jones’ mother Leslie (an obstetrician/gynecologist) appears briefly in the documentary and mostly shows support for Jones in making this movie, but she also expresses her disapproval of her daughter having to spend so much time with people whom Leslie thinks are unsavory characters because of their line of work. These mother/daughter scenes are mostly heartwarming, but viewers can tell that the subject of Naomi is too painful for them to talk about in depth on camera. (Jones’ parents are divorced, and her father does not appear in the documentary.)
There’s a little bit of Leslie that comes across in Jones’ grandmotherly Lorraine character. The character of Bella represents people who think all sex work should be legal everywhere. The character of Nereida is vehemently opposed to prostitution being legal, because she believes that prostitutes (especially female prostitutes) will still be exploited. In the beginning of the movie, Nereida argues with Jones about Jones glorifying prostitution in the documentary. And later, Nereida gives a passionate monologue that’s one of the movie’s best scenes. As for Rashid, this character is in the movie for pure comic relief as Jones’ driver. He doesn’t have much to say about the sex industry except to hint that he’s had experience in hiring sex workers.
People have different definitions of “sex work,” so “Sell/Buy/Date” talks mostly to sex workers whose primary sex work involves sex acts that are done in person. For example, there are no interviews with people who work only in phone sex or Internet/webcam sex. It’s debatable whether or not getting paid to strip and dance nude is considered “sex work,” but the movie includes a segment where Jones goes to a pole-dancing class taught by Amy Bond, founder of Pole + Dance Studios in San Francisco. During her interview, Bond opens up about her puritanical Mormon background and how she used to do porn. Bond encourages Jones and other people in the pole-dancing class to have more of a mind/body connection.
One of the more ironically interesting parts of the documentary is when Jones is in Las Vegas for a Sex Industrialist Revolution Conference taking place right next to an anti-sex trafficking conference. However, the documentary could have used more exploration of what making prostitution legal would really mean for sex-trafficking activities and how it all relates to gender issues. Men are the majority of customers for prostitutes, but the customers are punished less than the prostitutes, when it comes to the law and society’s judgments. It’s debatable if legal prostitution really erases the society stigma that prostitutes (who are usually female) have to bear more than their customers.
Some celebrities make cameos as themselves in the documentary. Rosario Dawson gives words of encouragement to Jones about making the movie. Ilana Glazer and Jones talk about the controversy over the “Sell/Buy/Date” play. Bryan Cranston appears toward the end of the film and shares a very personal story with Jones about how he lost his virginity to a prostitute.
At various points in the scripted parts of the movie, Jones is seen interacting by phone only with two characters from her “support team”: her manager Roger and her publicist Nora. These are fictional characters that could be based on real-life people. In the movie, it’s mentioned that Jones is in a “dead-end relationship” with Roger and that they are “just using each other.” Roger is also evicting her from a home that he’s been renting for her because he doesn’t want to pay her rent anymore. It’s never really explained in the movie how true any of this information is, but it looks out of place in a documentary.
For most of the documentary, the fictional characters drift in and out of the narrative. Other scenes not involving these fictional characters are deliberately staged, such as a scene where Jones is in a waiting room for a doctor’s appointment, and she’s sitting near a sex worker named Tish “The Dish” Roberts. The scene is staged to make it look like Roberts and Jones are meeting as random strangers for the first time, as Roberts sees Jones and gushes to Jones that she’s a fan of the “Sell/Buy/Date” play.
In this waiting room, the two women then talk about Roberts’ experiences as a sex worker. Roberts (who is African American) says she became a sex worker at age 17, when a white male schoolteacher she had at the time gave her a lot of attention that she craved. The teacher knew that Roberts came from an impoverished, broken home, so the attention that he gave her eventually turned to paying her to perform sex acts with him.
Roberts says that these payments for sex acts continued on more than one occasion, and she obeyed the teacher’s orders to keep everything a secret. She comments to Jones about that sexual experience: “It felt like a transaction. I learned to detach from it.”
In the conversation, Roberts thanks Jones for doing the “Sell/Buy/Date” play and movie for giving a voice to sex workers. Jones doesn’t pass judgment on Roberts, but neither does Jones call this teacher-student experience for what it really is: sexual exploitation. And depending on the age-of-consent-law in the state where it took place, it would have been illegal sexual abuse.
Lotus Lain, a sex worker who is also described as a “sex worker advocate,” warns Jones about the pitfalls of directing this documentary and not being in the sex industry herself: “You’re about to get yourself cancelled. You’re an outsider. You are what we call a ‘civilian.’ You do not understand what it is we go through to be telling our stories.” The conversation between Jones and Lain ends on a cordial note, but Jones does seem very aware throughout the film that she’s learning more about the sex industry as she goes along in making the documentary.
At first, some of the sex workers interviewed in the documentary paint a rosy picture of being in control of their work and their bodies. A common theme in this talk is that sex work can equal “empowerment.” But what “Sell/Buy/Date” eventually does is expose the different layers of the sex industry to show that the people who push the most for prostitution to be legal are the ones who are most likely to get the most financial gain from it. And men are the vast majority of the business owners in the sex industry.
In the documentary, these business owners include porn entrepreneur/actor Evan Seinfeld (also known as a musician who used to be the lead singer/bassist for the rock band Biohazard), who essentially brags about how much money he can make from porn and talks about how his employees (who are mostly women) can make a lot of money too. What he doesn’t mention (but is obvious to anyone who knows anything about business) is that because Seinfeld owns his company, he still makes more money than the people who work for him.
In Nevada (where prostitution is legal), brothel owner Alice Little gives Jones a cheerful tour of her Chicken Ranch brothel, which has only women as sex workers. Little talks about how the brothel is safe and regulated, but she glosses over any negative experiences her employees have had with customers. Little admits that she’s one of the very few women in the United States who owns a legal brothel. What Seinfeld and Little have in common is promoting their businesses in this documentary, so of course their agenda is to make the sex industry look as glamorous as possible.
But then, Jones shows another side of the sex industry that is more common: the workers who don’t own businesses in the sex industry, and who are at the mercy of customers, pimps/madams and other people who can exploit them. The documentary starts to get real when sex workers/activists such as Esperanza Fonseca (a transgender woman) and Pueblo tribe member Terria Xo open up about the violence and other abuse they’ve experienced in their line of work. Addictions to drugs and alcohol are also occupational hazards. When people talk about making prostitution legal, no one likes to talk about who’s going to pay the medical bills when these sex workers get viciously assaulted during their work.
Jones interviews Xo with other Native American activists, such as Jennifer Marley (who is Tewa, part of the Pueblo tribe) and Becki Jones (from the Diné/Navajo tribe), who give honest and direct talk about how sex workers who are women of color and transgender women are disproportionately more likely than any other sex workers to experience violence and death because of sex work. And therefore, they say that even if prostitution became legal everywhere in America, it still would not change the violence that can happen, and the racial and gender disparities in who gets to profit the most from sex work. “Sell/Buy/Date” doesn’t force viewers to think one way or another about these issues, but it admirably presents enough perspectives for viewers to make up their own minds.
UPDATE: Cinedigm will release “Sell/Buy/Date” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on October 14, 2022.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Texas in 1979, the horror film “X” features a cast of predominantly white characters (with one Latina and two African Americans) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: Six people go to a rented farm to make a porn movie, but the elderly spouses who own the farm show their violent disapproval.
Culture Audience: “X” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of writer/director Ti West and horror flicks that skillfully blend horror with satirical comedy.
Pictured clockwise, from left: Owen Campbell, Brittany Snow, Mia Goth, Scott Mescudi and Jenna Ortega in “X” (Photo by Christopher Moss/A24)
“X” is a horror film that doesn’t break any new ground, but this “slow burn” movie delivers some gruesome terror with touches of social satire that can bring some laughs. Written and directed by horror master Ti West, “X” is sure to count as one of his best movies. Will “X” be considered an iconic movie that influences countless other horror films? No. However, “X” takes a simple concept that other slasher movies mishandle and makes it something that horror fans can thoroughly enjoy, as long as people can tolerate watching some bloody violence that can be nauseating to some viewers.
“X” had its world premiere at the 2022 SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas. It’s fitting that the movie premiered in Texas, since the story takes place mostly in a rural and unnamed part of Texas. (“X” was actually filmed in New Zealand.) In “X,” the year is 1979, when porn movies made in the U.S. got an “X” rating for adults-only content. Six people in the adult film industry are going on a road trip to an isolated farm that the producer has rented, in order to make a porn film called “The Farmer’s Daughter.” This porn movie is a very low-budget film with only one camera.
The six people on this fateful trip are:
Wayne Gilroy (played by Martin Henderson), a brash, fast-talking middle-aged producer whose immediate goal in life is for “The Farmer’s Daughter” to be a blockbuster porn movie—or at least make a fraction of what “Debbie Does Dallas” made, so that Wayne can get out of debt.
Maxine Minx (played by Mia Goth), an up-and-coming actress who wants to be as famous as “Wonder Woman” TV star Lynda Carter. Off camera, Maxine (who’s in her 20s) is Wayne’s lover (he left his wife for her), and Wayne has promised to make Maxine a star. Maxine also has a cocaine habit, since she’s seen snorting coke several times in the movie.
Bobby-Lynne Parker (played by Brittany Snow), an experienced porn actress in her 30s, who styles her physical appearance like Marilyn Monroe, and who likes to think of herself as the reigning Southern belle of porn.
Jackson Hole (played by Scott Mescudi), the porn name of a well-endowed actor in his 30s who is the only male cast member doing the porn scenes in “The Farmer’s Daughter.” Bobby-Lynne and Jackson are also sex partners off-camera, in a “friends with benefits” relationship.
RJ Nichols (played by Owen Campbell), the director of “The Farmer’s Daughter.” RJ, who’s in his late 20s, likes to think that the porn movies he directs are cinematic art.
Lorraine Day (played by Jenna Ortega), RJ’s girlfriend, a “jack of all trades” crew member who is essentially RJ’s assistant. Lorraine is in her late teens or early 20s and is relatively new to the adult film industry. She’s eager to learn all that she can about filmmaking.
The movie’s opening scene shows viewers that this porn movie shoot will result in a massacre, since police officers arrive at the farm and see several bloody and mutilated dead bodies. The movie circles back to this crime scene at the end of the film. The rest of “X” shows what happened 24 hours earlier, leading up to the massacre.
It takes a while for “X” to get going, since the first half of the movie is about the road trip, arriving at the farm, and filming the sex scenes. The farm is owned by an elderly couple named Howard (played by Stephen Ure), nicknamed Howie, and his wife Pearl (also played by Goth), who have been married to each other for decades. Ure and Goth wear balding hair pieces and prosthetic makeup that give creepy and decrepit physical appearances to Howard and Pearl. Goth gives an absolutely maniacal performance as Pearl, who is much more disturbed and volatile than Howard.
Howard is a cantankerous veteran of World War I and World War II. The first thing that Howard does when he sees Wayne is pull a gun on him, until Wayne reminds Howard that he’s the movie producer who’s renting the farm for a film shoot. Wayne doesn’t tell this farm couple that this film shoot is for a porn movie, but Howard and Pearl inevitably find out because they’re on the property during this film shoot.
Pearl is starved for affection from her husband. When she tries to make amorous advances on Howard, he pushes her away and mentions his heart condition when he says, “You know I can’t. My heart.” Pearl is a former dancer who sees a lot of younger herself in Maxine and instantly fixates on Maxine. Pearl is also a voyeur, so it should come as no surprise that Pearl ends up watching one of the sex scenes that’s being filmed in the barn. And when she finds out that a porn movie is being made on her property, all hell breaks loose.
Before the murder and mayhem begin, “X” makes some sly commentary on how gender affects perceptions and judgments of people’s involvement in porn. This small cast and crew of “The Farmer’s Daughter” are a microcosm of larger issues in the adult film industry: Men are usually in charge and usually make the business decisions. The women are usually expected to follow orders.
Women in adult entertainment also get more of society’s stigma and degradation, compared to men in adult entertainment. A woman is much more likely than a man to be called a “whore” for doing porn. This derogatory name-calling happens in a scene in “X,” even though for “The Farmer’s Daughter” porn movie, a man is just as much of a participant in the sex scenes as the women. There’s a moment in the movie where one of the women flips the proverbial script and makes a decision that greatly upsets one of the men.
And because there are three couples on this trip, their dynamics also represent the types of relationships that can occur in the adult film industry. Wayne and Maxine represent a stereotypical older filmmaker who hooks up with a young actress and tells her a lot of big talk about making her a star. Bobby-Lynne and Jackson are swingers who don’t have any commitment in their relationship and don’t want to be bound by traditional sexual expectations. RJ and Lorraine represent people who are in the porn industry only to get filmmaking experience so that they can move on to mainstream movies.
“X” has the expected sex scenes, but there are also scenes that show the type of camaraderie that can happen during a film production. On their first night after filming scenes from “The Farmer’s Daughter,” the cast and crew hang out and have some drinks together. Bobby-Lynne leads a toast where she says, “Here’s to the perverts who’ve been paying our bills for years!”
After this toast, Bobby-Lynne sings Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” while Jackson plays acoustic guitar. Snow’s performance of “Landslide” is very good and one of the unexpected highlights in this horror film. This laid-back party scene is effective in showing how the people in this group have no idea what’s in store for them.
“X” has a few nods to 1970s horror classics, such as 1974’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and 1978’s “Halloween.” The comparisons to “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” are obvious. In “X,” Blue Oyster Cult’s 1976 song “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” song is played during a pivotal scene. Horror aficionados know that “Don’t Fear the Reaper” was also prominently featured in 1978’s “Halloween.”
Even though the first half of “X” doesn’t have any real terror, “X” still manages to keep viewers on edge over what might happen. There’s no real mystery of who the villains are, because this is a slasher flick that clearly forecasts who will be the perpetrators of the violence. Although the ideas in “X” aren’t very original, they’re still filmed in very suspenseful ways. And there’s an interesting twist/reveal toward the end of the film. Ultimately, “X” doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is: a worthy tribute to retro slasher films that makes “X” memorable in its own right.
A24 will release “X” in U.S. cinemas on March 18, 2022. The movie is set for release on digital and VOD is April 14, 2022.
Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed city in New Mexico, the comedy/drama film “Jethica” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with one Latina and one African American) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A woman has an unexpected reunion with a former classmate from high school, but this former classmate has a big problem: a stalker who follows her everywhere.
Culture Audience: “Jethica” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in offbeat dark comedies that are unpredictable.
Callie Hernandez and Will Madden in “Jethica” (Photo by Pete Ohs)
The dark comedy thriller “Jethica” blurs genres and cheekily plays with viewer expectations on what the movie is about and how it’s all going to end. Directed by Pete Ohs, “Jethica” has a relatively small number of cast members, and the movie clocks in at 70 minutes. It’s just the right amount of time to tell this story, in what could have easily been a short film. “Jethica” has a simple concept, but it’s depicted in a compellingly eerie way.
Five people have screenwriting credits for “Jethica”: director Ohs and four of the movie’s cast members: Callie Hernandez (who plays Elena), Ashley Denise Robinson (who plays Jessica), Will Madden (who plays Kevin) and Andy Faulkner (who plays Benny). By having so many cast members credited as screenwriters, “Jethica” gives the impression that much of this movie was improvised. And sure enough, in the production notes for “Jethica,” Ohs makes this statement: “Our creative process was an experiment. We went to New Mexico without a script and wrote the movie as we went.” “Jethica” had its world premiere at the 2022 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival.
On the surface, “Jethica” (which takes place in an unnamed city in New Mexico) sounds like a typical “woman in peril” movie about someone being followed by a stalker. But there’s more to the story than the stalking. The beginning of the film shows a woman in her 20s named Elena having a sexual tryst in the back of a car with an unnamed man (played by Alan Palomo), whose face is never seen in the movie. Based on their conversation, she thinks of him as no more than a casual hookup whom she sees on a semi-regular basis.
During this tryst, he asks Elena why she hasn’t invited him to her home. She explains that she has a roommate and doesn’t want to deal with scheduling their hookups based on when the roommate will be home or not. Elena then tells him that about a year ago, she lived alone in an isolated trailer that she inherited from her grandmother.
Elena states matter-of-factly that the reason for her seclusion was “because I killed somebody.” Elena’s lover responds sarcastically, “I had no idea I was hooking up with a murderer.” Elena then begins to tell what happened when she lived alone in that trailer. The movie then switches to flashback mode for nearly all of the story.
The flashback begins with Elena getting gas for her car at a gas station, where she randomly sees Jessica, a former classmate from high school, who’s getting gas for her own car. Elena and Jessica haven’t seen each other since they were high-school students. Their reunion starts off a little awkward, because Jessica doesn’t seem that happy to see Elena. Jessica comes across as uncomfortable and a little standoffish when talking to Elena.
Jessica says that she used to live in California, but she left because she had a stalker. She then moved to Santa Fe, but the stalker found her there too. Jessica says she’s on a road trip but doesn’t mention where she’s going. Elena invites Jessica to her place to hang out and have some coffee. At first Jessica says no, but then she changes her mind.
While Jessica follows Elena back to Elena’s trailer, she notices that Elena has stopped on the road to say hello to a man in his late 20s or early 30s. He seems to be walking with a slightly off-kilter gait and has a vacant stare. It’s unclear if the man is homeless or not. When they get to the trailer, Elena explains that the man’s name is Benny, and he’s a platonic friend of hers.
Jessica begins to open up to Elena about her stalker ordeal. She says that her stalker is a man named Kevin Morris, whom she barely knows, but somehow, he became obsessed with her. Jessica also mentions that the police won’t help with her stalking problem because Kevin didn’t break any laws by showing up in public in the same places where Jessica was.
However, Jessica shows Elena some of the creepy videos and letters that Kevin sent her. Although he never threatened her with bodily harm, his rantings became increasingly hostile because he became upset with Jessica for not responding to his communication. Kevin talks with a lisp, which is why the title of the movie is “Jethica.”
Elena generously tells Jessica that she can stay in Elena’s home as long as Jessica needs to stay. For now, Jessica just accepts the offer to stay the night. But it isn’t long before a man shows up outside the trailer. He restlessly paces back and forth and yells out Jessica’s name repeatedly.
A terrified Jessica peers out the window and is certain that the man, who looks a lot like Kevin, can’t possibly be Kevin. How can she be so sure? Who is this man? And how did he find Jessica in this very remote area? Those questions are eventually answered in the movie.
“Jethica” is a very atmospheric film that makes great use of the scenic vistas in New Mexico’s desert landscapes and Puebloan ruins. (The movie was filmed in Estancia, New Mexico.) “Jethica” director/co-writer Ohs is also the movie’s producer, cinematographer and film editor. Some of the sunset and nighttime shots in the movie are as breathtaking as they can be foreboding, because most of the movie takes place in a remote area where something ominous always seems to be on the brink of happening.
It’s not quite a horror film, but “Jethica” has some aspects of supernatural horror. Still, viewers should not expect major terror or chase scenes that are typical of supernatural horror movies. The movie has plenty of suspense and touches of sardonic comedy that make it worthwhile to viewers who can appreciate eccentric, low-budget films.
“Jethica” isn’t a movie where people give award-worthy performances, although all of the cast members are perfectly fine in their roles. That’s because all of the movie’s characters in this New Mexico desert area are guarded about something. The secrets that come out are what people will remember most about “Jethica.”
UPDATE: Cindeigm will release “Jethica” in select U.S. cinemas on January 13, 2023. Fandor will premiere the movie on February 14, 2023.
Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed U.S. city and in Augusta, Maine, the comedy film “I Love My Dad” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A divorced father, who is a pathological liar, tries to reconnect with his estranged, young adult son by creating a fake online profile where the father impersonates a woman who pretends to be romantically interested in the son.
Culture Audience: “I Love My Dad” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in quirky comedies that have incisive social commentary on “catfishing” (creating a fake online persona to deceive people) and dysfunctional family relationships.
James Morosini and Patton Oswalt in “I Love My Dad” (Photo courtesy of I Love My Dad LLC/Hantz Motion Pictures)
Inspired by a true story, “I Love My Dad” is the type of comedy that adeptly turns its most cringeworthy moments into its funniest moments. It’s not an easy challenge, considering that it’s a movie that will make many viewers uncomfortable. “I Love My Dad” has a double meaning, because it’s about a divorced father who pretends to be an attractive young woman online, so that he can lure his estranged son into an online emotional relationship. It’s all because this disturbed father is so desperate to reconnect with his son, he’s concocted this elaborate ruse, even if he knows it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
It’s the type of warped story that people might think could only be fabricated for a movie. However, it happened in real life to “I Love My Dad” writer/director James Morosini, who also stars as the hapless and beleaguered son in this movie. “I Love My Dad” had its world premiere at the 2022 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival, where it won the event’s top grand jury prize: Best Narrative Feature. As messy as the movie’s subject is, it’s also a wild and entertaining ride that’s made all the more poignant because it’s a deeply personal story.
“I Love My Dad” opens with a flashback scene of Chuck Green (played by Patton Oswalt) and his son Franklin Green (played by Seamus Callahan), who’s about 8 or 9 years old, taking home a stray black Labrador retriever that they found on the street. Eager to please his son, Chuck tells Franklin (who has no siblings) that they can keep the dog, which is male. Franklin asks, “What if he’s lost?” Chuck just shrugs.
As Chuck and Franklin walk home together with the dog, Chuck sees a “missing dog” flyer posted on a telephone pole. The dog in the flyer’s photo is the same dog that Chuck has taken, and the owner wants to find the dog. Out of Franklin’s sight and without any guilt, Chuck tears the flyer off the pole because he wants to keep the dog. It’s an indication of Chuck’s personality: impulsive, wanting immediate gratification, and very selfish.
The movie then fast-forwards to showing Franklin in his early 20s. His parents have been divorced for years, and Franklin is in therapy for anxiety and depression—mostly because his irresponsible and unreliable father Chuck has caused a lot of emotional damage to Franklin. Chuck is a chronic liar whose dishonesty was the main cause for the divorce.
Franklin is a misfit loner who lives with his mother Diane (played by Amy Landecker), who is very protective and concerned about Franklin’s mental health. Franklin is currently unemployed, but his dream job is to be a computer coder for a video game company. He spends a lot of time playing video games. The movie doesn’t mention where Franklin and Diane live, but it’s thousands of miles away from Chuck. Diane has not been in regular contact with Chuck for a long time—and she wants it to stay that way.
Meanwhile, Chuck (who lives in Augusta, Maine) is despondent because Franklin, whom he has not spoken to in about a year, has recently blocked Chuck from all of Franklin’s social media. Chuck is sulking about it at his office job (the movie never mentions what Chuck does for a living), and his mopey attitude is noticed by a co-worker named Jimmy (played by Lil Rel Howery). Jimmy asks Chuck why he looks so sad, and Chuck tells him about Franklin’s online snubbing.
Jimmy mentions to Chuck that when he was blocked online by an ex-girlfriend, all he had to do to continue following her on social media was to create a phony online persona and get on her online “friends” list again. Jimmy brags that the trick worked, and he was able to keep tabs on what this ex-girlfriend was doing. It’s an idea that Chuck takes to extremes.
Shortly after getting cut off from Franklin, Chuck goes to eat by himself at a local diner called Carl’s Kountry Kitchen. (“I Love My Dad” was filmed in New York state, and the movie includes the real Carl’s Kountry Kitchen, which is in Syracuse, New York.) Chuck’s server is a friendly woman in her early 20s named Becca (played by Claudia Sulewski), who has a “girl next door” attractiveness about her.
When Chuck goes home, he looks up Becca on the Internet and finds all of her social media. And that’s when he gets the idea to pretend to be Becca and contact Franklin. Chuck steals Becca’s identity and many of her online photos to create fake online profiles of her. When Franklin accepts the fake Becca’s friend requests, Franklin asks her during a chat why he’s the only person she’s following.
As the fake Becca, Chuck quickly comes up with an excuse that “Becca” has new accounts because she deleted her previous accounts when she took a break from social media. Franklin believes this excuse. Over time, Franklin and “Becca” get closer, as they open up to each other about their emotions and family problems. And it should come as no surprise that Franklin ends up falling for “Becca,” as Chuck gets more caught up in this elaborate and twisted masquerade.
Chuck is ecstatic that Franklin is talking to Chuck again, even though it’s all based on Chuck’s concocted lies. Chuck confides in his co-worker Jimmy about the fake online persona. Jimmy warns Chuck not to continue this deception because Franklin might permanently cut Chuck out of Franklin’s life if Franklin finds out the truth. Chuck ignores this advice because he’s self-centered and has become accustomed to lying to get what he wants.
One of the funniest aspects of “I Love My Dad” is how it shows Becca appearing to exist in person with Franklin when he’s chatting with her online or having fantasies about her. But then, the camera suddenly switches to the reality that Chuck is talking to Franklin, so Chuck is shown doing the things with Franklin that Franklin is simultaneously imagining that Becca is doing with Franklin. This switch of perspectives is cleverly edited to bring many laugh-out-loud moments for people watching the movie. Chuck has fantasies too, where he places himself in moments where he wants to emotionally bond with Franklin.
Franklin knows that “Becca” doesn’t live near him, but he eventually wants some kind of contact with her beyond words and photos on a screen. When he tries to set up an online video chat, “Becca” comes up with the excuse that her computer’s video camera is broken. Whenever Franklin becomes skeptical of “Becca” being real, Chuck thinks of something to continue the ruse.
At one point, Franklin insists on talking to “Becca” on the phone. And so, Chuck averts Franklin’s suspicions that “Becca” is a fake persona when Chuck enlists a neurotic co-worker whom he’s been dating named Erica (played by Rachel Dratch) to impersonate “Becca” over the phone. Erica is infatuated with Chuck, but she’s very reluctant to be a part of this deceit. Chuck lies to Erica by saying that it’s a prank that he and Franklin play on each other as a father-son tradition. Erica participates in this con only after she gets Chuck to agree to have sex with her at their office.
Of course, there’s a sexual component that becomes a part of Franklin’s online “romance” with “Becca.” It’s a part of the deception that makes Chuck the most squeamish and feeling very guilty about what he’s doing. But that doesn’t stop dishonest Chuck from making Erica an unwitting accomplice during a hilarious scene involving online sex talk.
To be clear: “I Love My Dad” does not condone incest or sexual abuse. Rather, it shows in amusing and unsettling ways how pathetic online liars can be with their con games. The people who know Chuck’s secret (his co-workers Jimmy and Erica) express their disapproval to Chuck, but Chuck is the type of person who will do what he wants, no matter what other people say about it being wrong. The movie makes it obvious that as much as Chuck thinks he’s too smart to get caught, he’s really the one who’s degrading himself the most.
“I Love My Dad” has some hilarious twists and turns as Chuck’s lies get bigger, and he goes to greater lengths to prevent his lies from being exposed. This movie works so well as a comedy, mainly because the story doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s really a “truth is stranger than fiction” movie that seems so absurd, it might as well be a comedy. Morosini admirably channels what must have been a very painful time in his life into a story that can not only entertain people but also provoke thoughtful discussions about healing from family dysfunction, deciding what to forgive, and choosing which family members to have in one’s life.
The lead performances by Morosini and Oswalt make this movie’s engine run with a crackling energy of two characters who are at odds with each other but also weirdly co-dependent on each other for emotional validation. Some viewers might not care for how “I Love My Dad” ends, while other viewers will love the movie’s ending. Either way, the intended message of “I Love My Dad” is that there’s sometimes no way to predict what people will do to be close to the ones they love.
UPDATE: Magnolia Pictures will release “I Love My Dad” in select U.S. cinemas on August 5, 2022. The movie is set for release on digital and VOD on August 12, 2022.
Pictured clockwise, from bottom left: Olivia Luccardi, Dana Millican, Stefanie Estes, Rebekah Wiggins, Eleanore Pienta and Nina E. Jordan in “Soft & Quiet” (Photo by Greta Zozula)
Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed U.S. city, the dramatic film “Soft & Quiet” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with two Asians and one Latina) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: White supremacist women gather to form a racist hate group, and some of them plot to get revenge on two Asian women in a crime that spirals out of control.
Culture Audience: “Soft & Quiet” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in movies that have accurate depictions of racist hate crimes and the people who commit them.
Stefanie Estes in “Soft & Quiet” (Photo by Greta Zozula)
Even though this movie’s title is “Soft & Quiet,” the movie’s message is meant to sound a very loud and urgent alarm. It’s a brutally realistic and disturbing depiction of female white supremacists who try to look harmless, but whose toxic bigotry can erupt into vicious hate crimes. Most movies (fiction and non-fiction) about white supremacists often focus on male racists, because male racists tend to be more visible to the public, such as when men are the majority of attendees at hate rallies. “Soft & Quiet” writer/director Beth de Araújo exposes the equally dangerous and often more covert insidiousness of women who identify as white supremacists and who will do whatever it takes to oppress and violate people who aren’t white.
Although the characters in this movie are fictional, they represent exactly how many hate-filled racists actually think and act in the real world. “Soft & Quiet” had its world premiere at the 2022 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival. It would be foolish to dismiss “Soft & Quiet” as being overly dramatic or an “only in a movie” story. Anyone can look up real-life hate crimes to see that what happens in this movie has happened in one form or another in real life—and the crimes are often much worse than what’s in a movie. And those are just the crimes that were reported. There are unknown numbers of unreported crimes that will never be made public.
People who watch “Soft & Quiet” without knowing anything about the movie beforehand might think from the film’s first 15 minutes that it’s just a lightweight story about some suburban women getting together to form a support group in a church. That’s the intention of the movie: to make people aware that racists who have these hateful beliefs often give the appearance of being inoffensive, law-abiding citizens. It’s that false sense of “unthreatening normalcy” that acts as a façade for many racists who are hiding in plain sight and who intend to violate other people’s civil rights, based on their race.
“Soft & Quiet,” which takes place in an unnamed U.S. city, begins with a scene in an unnamed primary school restroom, where a schoolteacher in her 30s named Emily (played by Stefanie Estes) is in a toilet stall and looking at the result of a pregnancy test. Emily bursts into tears when she sees the result of the test. Later in the movie, it’s revealed that Emily and her husband have been unsuccessfully trying to start a family. This latest pregnancy test shows that she’s not pregnant.
Emily gathers her composure as she walks out of the restroom. School sessions have ended for the day, and Emily sees a cleaning employee named Maria (played by Jovita Molina), who’s doing her job on the premises. Emily apparently is a teacher of first graders or second graders, because one of her students is a boy named Daniel (played by Jayden Leavitt), who’s about 7 or 8 years old.
Daniel is waiting outside by himself because his mother is late in picking him up. Emily expresses some concern about this child being alone, but she’s more concerned about telling Daniel to scold Maria to not mop any floors until after Daniel leaves. Emily says it’s because Daniel could slip and hurt himself on a wet floor. When Daniel’s mother arrives, Emily makes sure to tell her that she was looking out for Daniel and that this school employee could’ve put Daniel’s life in danger. Daniel’s mother expresses gratitude to Emily for being so conscientious.
Emily is not saying these things out of the kindness of her heart. The movie shows in subtle ways, which become more obvious when Emily’s true racist nature is revealed, that Emily wanted Daniel to put this Latina employee “in her place,” because Emily firmly believes in white supremacy. Throughout the movie, there are several references to the white supremacist women being preoccupied with feeling that their race is “endangered” in America.
After she leaves the school, Emily goes to a local church, where she has gathered a group of five other women (ranging in ages from late 20s to late 30s) for a meeting. At first, the women exchange small talk. But then, Emily unwraps the cherry pie that she brought to the meeting. The pie has a Nazi swastika carved in the center. All of the women laugh with glee and amusement when they see this hateful and disgusting symbol.
That’s because the women who have gathered for this meeting want to form a group called Daughters of Aryan Unity. A few of the women already know each other, while others do not. The women sit in a circle and introduce themselves, beginning with Emily, and they all express much of their racial hostility and resentments. Many of their vile comments are what you would expect from bigots who think that people who are white, Christian, heterosexual and cisgender are superior to everyone else.
Here are brief descriptions of the other members of the group:
Kim (played by Dana Millican), a married mother of two children, is the owner/manager of a local convenience store. Kim has a journalism degree and a brittle, no-nonsense attitude. She offers to be in charge of the group’s planned newsletter. Kim immediately shows her anti-Semitism when she complains about Jews owning banks and controlling the mainstream media. Emily and Kim have known each other for years.
Leslie (played by Olivia Luccardi) has recently moved to the area. She’s a bachelorette who later reveals that she’s an ex-con and comes from a “shitty family.” Leslie was invited to this meeting by Kim, because Leslie works at the same convenience store. Leslie thinks of Kim as her mentor. It should come as no surprise, considering Leslie’s criminal background, that Leslie ends up being the biggest loose cannon in the group.
Marjorie (played by Eleanore Pienta) is a retail store employee, who’s angry that a female co-worker of Colombian heritage got a job promotion that Marjorie wanted. Even though Marjorie admits that her supervisor told Marjorie that the promoted employee has “better leadership skills” than Marjorie does, Marjorie still thinks that Marjorie was entitled to the promotion because she’s been a store employee longer and because she is a white American. Marjorie, who dismisses any of the promoted co-worker’s job qualifications, says that the co-worker only got promoted because of “diversity and because she’s brown.”
Nora (played by Nina E. Jordan), a lifelong member of the Ku Klux Klan, says that her father was a KKK chapter president in Valentine, Nebraska. Nora, who is married and pregnant with her fifth child, believes that people of different races are better-off being separated from each other. She has this to say about race mixing: “I’m here to talk common sense. Multiculturism doesn’t work.”
Alice (played by Rebekah Wiggins), an awkward loner, says that she’s a married homemaker who spends “a lot of time by myself and in my thoughts.” Even if this group has beliefs that unite them, the “mean girls” element is still there. After the meeting, a few of the women single out Alice behind her back because they think Alice is a misfit who might not be compatible with the other women.
Emily leads the discussions and makes these remarks: “We are here to support each other during this multicultural warfare. I have been brainwashed to feel shame for my heritage, to feel guilty for the prosperity our husbands, our fathers, our brothers created in the Western world and that everyone else benefited from.” In her racist speech, Emily ignores historical facts about the United States, where white supremacy caused genocide of indigenous people, enslavement of black people, and other racist human-rights violations that resulted in white people benefiting and prospering the most from this racism.
When talking about the proposed newsletter, Emily makes a comment that best sums up why these types of female white supremacists are so sneaky: “We have to be careful with the first issue [of the newsletter]. We want to engage the mainstream. We can’t come on too strong, okay? Soft on the outside, so vigorous ideas can be digested more easily. We are the best secret weapon that no one checks at the door because we tread quietly.”
Not everyone is welcoming of this group’s racist beliefs. Something happens that abruptly breaks up the meeting: The church pastor, who is in the building, apparently overheard this discussion, and that’s how he found out that Emily was hosting a white supremacist meeting. The pastor takes Emily aside privately, expresses his disapproval, and tells her that if she and her group leave immediately and never come back, he won’t report them. Emily ends the meeting, but she doesn’t tell the other members of the group that they have been kicked out by the church pastor.
Not long after this church expulsion, something happens that changes the course of the story. Emily, her husband Craig (played by Jon Beavers) and Marjorie happen to be in the convenience store where Kim and Leslie are working. The store is about to close when two sisters in their 20s go in the store. Kim announces that the store is closed, but the older and more assertive sister, whose name is Anne (played Melissa Paulo), says she just needs to quickly buy a bottle of wine. The younger sister’s name is Lily (played by Cissy Ly), who is quieter than Anne and is more likely to want to avoid confrontations.
Anne and Lily both happen to be Asian. And when they go in the store, they are the only people of color who are there. What happens next triggers a series of events that turn “Soft & Quiet” from a conversation-driven movie into a gripping portrayal of heinous and irreversible actions. It’s enough to say, without revealing too many details, that the white supremacists instigate a physical altercation at the store, and then they impulsively hatch a vengeful plot that targets Anne and Lily.
It’s important for viewers to notice that when the members of this white supremacist group commit the crimes that they commit, they are always thinking about how they can use their privileges as white women to get away with the crimes. There are subtle and not-so-subtle references to how they think because they are white women, they are more likely to be believed than people who aren’t white. They also engage in a lot of ego posturing about how they are the “good people,” while their victims and targets of their hate are the “bad people.” And during one particularly harrowing scene, Kim mentions that she knows plenty of cops who can protect her and other members of this racist group if they do something wrong.
All of the cast members in the movie give authentic portrayals of their characters, which is why “Soft & Quiet” will touch a lot of nerves in viewers who might see people they know in these characters. Emily has a respectable job as a teacher of very young and impressionable kids, but it masks her dark side that she only shows to certain people. Estes gives a chilling but effective performance as someone who presents herself as one way to most of the world but is actually another way in reality.
Luccardi’s unhinged portrayal of Leslie represents the type of white supremacist who doesn’t really care about hiding hate. Leslie is the only one in this movie who mentions anything about her background. She’s the only one in this group who has a criminal record. But the point of “Soft & Quiet” isn’t to blame family upbringings or over-explain backstories for why these women turned out the way that they did. The point of the movie is to show viewers that this is how a lot of racists are behind closed doors.
“Soft & Quiet” is an impressive feature-film debut from writer/director de Araújo, who shows great skill in how the movie unpeels the layers of racist hate. The movie also succeeds in how it credibly transitions from camaraderie-filled discussions to a maelstrom of terror and violence. The film’s compelling cinematography (by Greta Zozula), music (by Miles Ross) and editing (by Lindsay Armstrong) will engulf viewers in this tension-filled environment.
“Soft & Quiet” is not an easy film to watch. It’s meant to make people uncomfortable. It might make people angry or sad. The violence and hatred unleashed by the movie’s racist characters might be triggering for some viewers who’ve experienced these types of crimes. Some viewers might be so turned-off or upset, they might not be able to finish watching the movie. Regardless of what people think of “Soft & Quiet,” the movie serves its purpose if it makes people more aware and less in denial about the racists who live among us and how poisonous these bigots can be.
UPDATE: Momentum Pictures will release “Soft & Quiet” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on November 4, 2022.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Ireland, the horror film “The Cellar” features an all-white cast of characters representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A married couple and their two children move into a house that has a history of being haunted and where previous residents have mysteriously disappeared.
Culture Audience: “The Cellar” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching formulaic horror movies that don’t do anything truly unique.
Eoin Macken and Abby Fitz in “The Cellar” (Photo by Martin Maguire/RLJE Films/Shudder)
“The Cellar” succeeds in creating a spooky atmosphere, but it fails to rise above countless other haunted house stories, because of the movie’s weak screenplay, mediocre acting and dull pacing. “The Cellar” is too generic to be a memorable horror film. There are so many overused concepts in “The Cellar” that are in better haunted house movies, you can really do a checklist of all the ideas that are recycled in “The Cellar.”
Written and directed by Brendan Muldowney, “The Cellar” is based on his short film “The Ten Steps.” It’s yet another story about a family moving into a house with very dark secrets that the family won’t discover until it’s too late. And the people living in the house stay much longer than most people would in real life, just so the terror in the movie can be stretched out in repetitive scenes. “The Cellar” had its world premiere on the same date at the 2022 editions of the South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival and FrightFest Glasgow.
The family at the center of “The Cellar” are spouses Keira Woods (played by Elisha Cuthbert) and Brian Woods (played by Eoin Macken) and their children Ellie Woods (played by Abby Fitz) and Steven Woods (played by Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady). Ellie, who’s about 16 or 17 years old, is a stereotypical pouty teen. Her idea of rebelling is reading books on anarchy and getting an ankle tattoo of the anarchy symbol. Steven, who’s about 10 or 11 years old, is a stereotypical adorable tyke with the expected wide-eyed, open-mouthed, shocked reactions when the terror in the house begins to happen.
The Woods family’s new home is a drab and shabby mansion in an unnamed city in Ireland. (The movie was actually filmed on location in Roscommon, Ireland.) And as haunted houses typically are in horror movies, this house is in an isolated wooded area. The family members are all natives of Ireland, except for Keira, who’s either Canadian or American. (Cuthbert is Canadian in real life.)
“The Cellar” opens with the Woods family’s first day and night in the house. Brian and Steven are already there, while Keira and Ellie arrive separately by car. Ellie is already sulking because she didn’t want to move away from her friends. Upon seeing the house for the first time, Ellie says, “Holy shit. It’s so ugly!”
Why is this the first time that Ellie is seeing this house? It’s because Brian and Keira bought the house at an extremely low price at an auction. And they later find out the hard way that this bargain was too good to be true. And yes, “The Cellar” is another haunted house movie where the new residents didn’t bother to find out any background information about the house before buying it. The house still has furnishings and decorations left behind by the previous owner.
“The Cellar” doesn’t waste any time in showing that the house’s cellar is a place where sinister things happen. Within minutes of being in the house for the first time, Ellie goes in the cellar and declares to Keira, who’s near the door: “It’s filthy!” Keira replies, “I like to think of it as character.” And sure enough, Ellie mysteriously gets locked in the cellar, she freaks out, and then manages to escape. “I’m not staying in this house!” Ellie wails.
But of course, Ellie does stay in the house. After all, where else is she going to go in a hackneyed horror movie? All of the house’s rooms are predictably dark, as if everyone who’s lived there couldn’t be bothered to get a proper lamp or lighting that can illuminate more than certain corners of a room.
Ellie gets even more irritated with her parents when she finds out she has to look after Steven like a babysitter on their first night in the house. That’s because Keira and Brian, who are independent TV producers, have to work late because of an important pitch meeting related to their business. Keira tells Ellie that they need to sell this pitch in order for the family to financially survive.
Meanwhile, back in the mansion that doesn’t know the meaning of full-wattage light bulbs, Ellie is bitterly complaining to her boyfriend on the phone about how she much she dislikes her new home and how it’s unfair that she and Brian have to be in this creepy house alone on their first night there. The boyfriend listens to Ellie gripe about how much she misses him and their friends, and he suggests that he stay with her, even though Ellie’s parents wouldn’t let her do that. Ellie tells him why her parents are working late and says, “I hope they go bust, and we have to sell this house!”
Keira and Brian are independent TV producers who are trying to launch a reality show geared to teenagers called “Natural Selection,” where a young actress will pretend to be a popular vlogger. The pitch meeting takes place in a darkly lit conference room (everything in this movie is darkly lit or in tones of gray), where Keira and Brian are trying to sell this show to TV executives. There are vague mentions about viewer voting based on the physical appearances of the reality show’s cast members. It sounds like a horrible idea.
While Keira and Brian are in this meeting, the electricity suddenly goes out in their house. And what a coincidence: The circuit breaker is in the cellar. Guess who has to be the one to go back to the dreaded cellar to figure out what’s going on with the circuit breaker? Ellie calls Keira to tell her about this electricty outage. Keira excuses herself from the meeting and tells Ellie that she has to be the one to fix the electricity problem by finding the circuit breaker.
Ellie is in a near-panic because she’s scared and reluctant to go back to the cellar. During this phone conversation, Keira instructs Ellie on how to find the circuit breaker in the cellar. And because this movie is filled with as many horror clichés as possible, Ellie is holding a lit candle in the cellar, instead of a more practical flashlight or a smartphone light.
Keira guides Ellie by telling her how many steps she needs to take to get to the circuit breaker. To help calm down Ellie, Keira tells Ellie to count out loud how many steps she’s taking for this walkthrough. During this counting out loud, the phone disconnects. Keira calls back and gets no answer. And when Keira and Brian get home, they find out to their shock that Ellie has disappeared.
A police investigator named Detective Brophy (played by Andrew Bennett) is called to the scene. Keira and Brian aren’t completely alarmed because they tell the detective that Ellie has run away before, and she’ll probably come back in a few days. A small search team looks though the woods to no avail. Keira puts up some missing-person flyers around the area. Meanwhile, “The Cellar” is so poorly written, it never shows Keira or Brian contacting any of Ellie’s friends to find out if these friends have seen her, which would be one of the first things that parents of a missing child would do.
The rest of “The Cellar” gets a bit monotonous, as Keira discovers strange symbols in the house and tries to find out what they all mean. Eventually, the search for Ellie becomes less of a priority in the movie than Keira playing detective to find out the history of the house and to get more information about the previous residents. Ellie contacts the auction manager, who says that the house was previously owned by an elderly woman whom he never met because her attorney was his main contact for the auction.
Because clues are easily given to Keira throughout the movie, she notices that the house has a portrait painting of a university mathematician named John Fetherston, the deceased patriarch of the family that previously lived there. She goes on a quest to find out this family’s background. The answers she gets are utterly predictable.
During this investigation that takes up a lot of Keira’s time, the movie never bothers again to address Keira and Brian’s job predicament that has made them financially desperate. As the days go by, and Ellie remains missing, these parents of a missing child don’t have realistic conversations about this family crisis of a child’s disappearance. It’s why “The Cellar” mishandles the separate terror of a family who has a missing child.
Instead, the movie puts more emphasis on the banal horror trope of a woman being perceived as mentally ill if she suspects what’s going on has to do with the supernatural. Brian questions Keira’s mental health when she divulges some of her theories about why the house might be haunted. Keira also begins to believe that Ellie didn’t run away but that Ellie was abducted—and not necessarily by a human being.
Meanwhile, more stereotypical haunted house hijinks ensue. Doors mysteriously open on their own. Objects get moved with no explanation. Steven gets locked in a room on one occasion, even though no one else appears to be there. The house’s electricity malfunctions again. It all just leads to a conclusion that would only be surprising to people who fell asleep during the movie’s boring middle section. The movie’s last scene is actually one of the few highlights of “The Cellar,” but it’s too little, too late.
One of the more commendable aspects of “The Cellar” is composer Stephen McKeon’s effectively haunting score. This music is sometimes used in over-the-top ways, but it does bring a consistent level of invoking the right moods for each scene. The production design for “The Cellar” is also noteworthy, although nothing in this movie is going to win any awards. The movie’s visual effects are adequate and not gruesome, for viewers who don’t like seeing bloody gore. Still, most of the movie’s “jump scares” just aren’t very scary, and they lack originality.
Unfortunately, the quality of “The Cellar” is lowered by Cuthbert’s stiff performance. She’s never really believable as a mother who’s frantically worried about her missing child. And in scenes where she should be conveying more emotion, Cuthbert just delivers her lines flatly. All the other cast members are in underwritten and underdeveloped roles, with nothing particularly special about their acting. “The Cellar” isn’t the worst horror movie ever, but it doesn’t have the spark, personality or creative imagination to make it stand out from other horror movies with the same ideas.
RLJE Films will release “The Cellar” in select U.S. cinemas on April 15, 2022, the same date that the movie premieres on Shudder.
Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed city in Utah, the horror movie “Deadstream” features an all-white cast of characters representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A controversial Internet prankster does a livestream event from a haunted house, and he experiences unexpected terror.
Culture Audience: “Deadstream” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching poorly made horror movies with an extremely annoying main character.
Joseph Winter in “Deadstream” (Photo courtesy of Shudder)
“Deadstream” is dead on arrival with its bungled attempt at taking the over-used concept of a haunted house and blending it with the tech concept of Internet livestreaming. It’s the type of idiotic horror flick where the obnoxious main character hides in a van to avoid being killed by an attacker, but then he keeps screaming loudly, thereby exposing his hiding place. In fact, throughout this movie, viewers will wish that the dimwitted, motormouth main character of “Deadstream” would just shut up and go away.
Written and directed by husband-and-wife duo Joseph Winter and Vanessa Winter, “Deadstream” could have been a better movie on so many levels. The movie’s plot—horror during a livestream, set in one location—is not completely original but it has a lot of potential for some genuine scares and compelling characters. Unfortunately, “Deadstream” is ruined by a whiny-voiced protagonist whose non-stop annoying chatter is the equivalent of verbal diarrhea.
It’s one of those movies where you can immediately tell, without even looking at the film credits, that the irritating and off-putting main character is the movie’s director. How can you tell? Because the acting is horrible, and everything about this character (and this movie) is extremely self-indulgent with no real self-awareness of how bad everything is, which is usually a sign that if the director is an actor, then he cast himself as the star of the movie.
Unfortunately, in “Deadstream,” viewers are stuck with this insufferable main character, who is in every scene of this dull, unimaginative and sloppily made film. His name is Shawn Ruddy (played by Joseph Winter), a Utah-based cretin who makes his living as a controversial Internet personality. Shawn, who is in his 30s, films himself doing extreme pranks and stunts, and he puts those videos online.
Shawn’s entire act is to do things where he says he’s facing his greatest fears. “Deadstream” is filmed almost entirely as if it’s a livestream of what happens to Shawn in the movie. Although “Deadstream” takes place in an unnamed city in Utah, the movie was actually filmed in Spanish Fork, Utah. “Deadstream” had its world premiere at the 2022 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival.
What Shawn has done in his quest for more Internet fame has gotten him banned and/or de-monetized from several social media platforms. Some of his pranks and stunts include intentionally provoking a police officer (there’s brief flashback footage of Shawn picking a fight with a cop in uniform and being chased by the cop), as well as some other tacky and dumb things that aren’t shown in the movie but are mentioned, such as smuggling himself across the U.S./Mexico border, so he could ridicule undocumented Mexican immigrants. Another of Shawn’s controversial stunts was paying a homeless man to fight Shawn, and then beating up the homeless man.
The movie obviously wants to be a spoof of the real-life Internet jerks who do these tasteless and often-illegal stunts, but the comedy in “Deadstream” falls very flat. The biggest problem with this movie’s failed attempt at satire is that “Deadstream” has nothing clever or funny to say about this subculture of people who seek fame and fortune on the Internet by putting themselves and other people in harm’s way. The beginning of the movie shows Shawn trying to redeem himself by announcing to his audience that he will do a stunt where he won’t hurt other people.
Shawn is now livestreaming on a website called Livid.tv, which is one of the last places on the Internet that will host his shenanigans. It’s never mentioned in the movie how many Internet followers Shawn has, but he has a devoted group of people who still want to see his mindless antics. Shawn announces to his audience one day: “I’m mortally terrified of ghosts. For my next livestream event, I will be spending one night alone in a haunted house.”
An unnamed sponsor is paying Shawn to do this livestream. Under the terms of the sponsor contract, Shawn has to be the only person in the house during this livestream. And if he sees or hears anything unusual, he has to check it out. If he breaks these rules, he won’t get paid. However, one of these rules gets broken, in order to service what happens in most of the movie.
The first third of “Deadstream” is a monotonous slog of Shawn talking on camera while he’s in the haunted house, explaining the house’s history, and showing viewers each room in the house. In between, he makes wisecracks that aren’t funny at all. The small, abandoned house, which is nicknamed Death Manor, is in an isolated wooded area. The house is dirty, damaged, and has been boarded up since the 1950s.
When Shawn first arrives at Death Manor (which he calls “the most haunted house in the world”), he shows his livestream audience that he’s serious about not leaving in case he gets scared. On camera, he removes his car’s spark plugs and throws them into the woods. The history of Death Manor is that it was built in 1880 by a wealthy Mormon pioneer, who built the house for his adult daughter named Mildred Pratt, who was a poet and a social outcast.
As a young woman, Mildred had a long-distance love affair with a book publisher named Lars Jorgensen, who was based in Boston. Lars proposed marriage to Mildred, and she accepted his proposal. But tragically, two days before Mildred was going to travel to Boston to be with Lars, he died in an accident. Distraught over Lars’ death, Mildred committed suicide in the house. Over the years, several other people, including five children, have mysteriously died in the house, with the legend being that Mildred is the ghost who’s haunting the house and causing these deaths.
One of the men who died in the house wrote about a recurring dream of seeing a ghost in the house, with the ghost saying, “The pond water is still.” The movie wastes some time with Shawn showing his audience some archival clips of paranormal investigators who spent time in the house. None of this is really spoiler information, because most of the movie’s “horror” is about whether or not Shawn will encounter Mildred or other ghosts.
One of this livestream event’s rules is broken when a woman in her 20s named Chrissy (played by Melanie Stone) unexpectedly shows up and says that she’s a major fan of Shawn, and she wants to hang out with him at this house and possibly help him. Shawn wants Chrissy to leave because his sponsor contract says that he has to spend the night alone in the house. However, several viewers demand that Chrissy stay in the house because they think she looks sexy.
Shawn takes a viewer vote over whether or not Chrissy can stay in the haunted house with him, and the vast majority of viewers vote for Chrissy to stay. Shawn says on camera that the sponsor can make an exception to the rule since Chrissy being in the house is what the majority of Shawn’s audience wanted. Chrissy is very much a fawning “fangirl” who seems to have a big crush on Shawn. Some of the viewers commenting online also notice that Chrissy is a lot braver than Shawn in this haunted house. Of course, this wouldn’t be a horror movie if things didn’t go terribly wrong, and some dangerous madness ensues.
One of the missed opportunities in “Deadstream” is how inconsistently it shows Shawn’s engagement with his live audience. There are some viewer comments shown on screen, and Shawn occasionally responds directly to some of these comments. But then, there are other scenes where the comments should be on the computer screen, but they’re not. Some of the comments say exactly what “Deadstream” viewers will be thinking, when they talk about how boring everything is.
Shawn wears or holds a camera that can show the audience what he’s seeing. He also wears a helmet with built-in flashlight, since the house has no electricity or other lighting. In addition to having a computer tablet and a laptop computer, Shawn has a camera with a ‘”selfie” angle. Expect to see a lot of close-ups of Shawn’s face in “Deadstream,” which has many scenes that were obviously inspired other horror movies about people who film themselves during a ghost investigation, such as 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project” and 2009’s “Paranormal Activity.”
Shawn does a lot of talking at the camera, but he’s so self-absorbed that he doesn’t interact with the audience as much as he should, even though audience interaction is one of the main purposes of a livestream. When a lot of the mayhem starts, Shawn is obviously preoccupied with what’s in front of him, but “Deadstream” doesn’t really show a lot of live-reaction terrified comments from people in Shawn’s audience, who are supposed to be witnessing the horror in real time.
Instead, there are parts of the movie where Shawn occasionally logs on to video messages to get advice or knowledge from people in the audience. These parts of the movie look awkward and don’t transition well in the already-erratic flow of the story. There are parts of the movie involving poems and spell chants that are very bottom-of-the-barrel silly with no creativity.
In fact, there are huge sections of “Deadstream” that seem to want viewers to forget that everything is happening in front of people in a live audience. That’s because the movie clumsily handles the scenes where Shawn repeatedly screams for help. Shawn apparently didn’t bring a phone with him. And even if he did, it’s unlikely he would get a signal, because that hindrance is typical in horror movies with people stuck in isolated areas.
One of the movie’s biggest plot holes is that it never explains where Shawn is getting his WiFi service in this remote, wooded area and in an abandoned house with no electricity. Because of this plot hole, the entire concept of the movie falls apart. “Deadstream” comes across as a movie where the filmmakers think viewers are too stupid to see this obvious plot hole.
Sometimes, plot holes can be overlooked in a horror movie if it really delivers on some genuinely scary moments. Unfortunately, “Deadstream” falls short of this basic standard. The movie has too much of Shawn’s incessant yakking, moronic shrieking and self-centered posturing, but not enough action, which doesn’t really kick in until the last third of the film. The visual effects and makeup for the supernatural entities are creepy, but not terrifying. “Deadstream,” much like its dreadful main character, ultimately wears out its welcome long before the movie is over.
Shudder will premiere “Deadstream” on October 6, 2022.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Canberra, Australia, the horror movie “Sissy” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few black people and one Asian) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A social media influencer is invited to a weekend getaway party by a former childhood friend, and bitter emotions lead to murder and mayhem.
Culture Audience: “Sissy” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in horror movies that have a satirical tone.
Pictured clockwise, from bottom left: Yerin Ha, Daniel Monks, Emily De Margheriti, Hannah Barlow and Lucy Barrett in “Sissy” (Photo courtesy of Shudder)
The darkly comedic horror film “Sissy” sarcastically combines bloody gore with incisive commentary about friendships, bullying and social media culture. It’s a movie that might start off seeming to be one way, but some clever twists and turns take viewers on a bumpy and unpredictable ride. The scares aren’t so much in the violent and gruesome deaths but in the horror of how easily people can be manipulated into thinking certain ways about other people, based on contrived and superficial images. “Sissy” had its world premiere at the 2022 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival.
“Sissy” is written and directed by Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes, who previously teamed up for the 2017 comedy/drama feature film “For Now.” Barlow is also an actress in “For Now,” as she is in “Sissy.” The title character in “Sissy” (which takes place in Canberra, Australia) is named Cecilia (played by Aisha Dee), but her childhood nickname was Sissy. This childhood is shown in several flashbacks depicted through Cecilia’s memories and home videos that she has kept over the years.
The flashbacks show Cecilia/Sissy when she was 12 years old (played by Amelia Lule) and hanging out with her best friend at the time: Emma (played by Camille Cumpston), who is the same age. The two girls are seen doing what adolescent best friends often do: They dance together to pop songs, they talk about their hopes and dreams, and they pledge to be best friends forever. In one of the flashbacks, Emma tells Cecilia/Sissy: “Let’s make a pact: No matter what happens, we end up in the nursing home together. You’re the only person I want to poop my pants with.”
The movie opens 12 years after these home videos were made. Cecilia and Emma (played by Barlow) haven’t seen or spoken to each other in years. Cecilia is now making a living as a social media influencer who gives New Age positive self-help and self-esteem advice on videos that she puts online. Using the social media name Sincerely Cecilia, she currently has about 200,000 followers on social media, where she talks a lot about meditation and creating “safe spaces.”
One day, Cecilia is in a drugstore pharmacy when she randomly sees Emma. Cecilia seems alarmed and backs away, as if she doesn’t want to Emma to see her. But Emma does see Cecilia, and Emma is very happy to see her. Emma and Cecilia give each other updates on what they’ve been doing with their lives.
Cecilia is uncomfortable and a little bit guarded during this conversation, but Emma doesn’t notice this discomfort at all. In fact, Emma seems to be very impressed with Cecilia being an “influencer” with a six-figure following on social media. Emma is also eager to have Cecilia back in her life, so she impulsively invites Cecilia to the engagement party that’s she’s having to celebrate her impending marriage to her fiancée Fran (played by Lucy Barrett). Cecilia reluctantly accepts the invitation.
At this festive party, which is held at a nightclub, Cecilia meets Fran, who is very friendly and tells Cecilia that Emma talks a lot about her. Cecilia doesn’t know anyone else at the party except for Emma, whose many friends in attendance include gossipy Jamie (played by Daniel Monks) and talkative Tracey (played by Yerin Ha). After some initial hesitation, Cecilia ends up having a fairly good time at the party, even though a drunken Emma pulled Cecilia on stage and forced her to sing karaoke with her, and Emma vomited on Cecilia. It’s one of the many comedic moments in the movie.
Emma and Cecilia’s reunion goes well enough that Emma insists that Cecilia come along to a weekend getaway trip that Emma is having with a small group of friends at a remote house in a wooded area. On this trip are Emma, Cecilia, Fran, Jamie and Tracey, who travel in one car to the vacation house. Another guest is already at the house when they arrive. And she’s not happy to see Cecilia at all. In fact, she’s absolutely furious about it.
Her name is Alexandra “Alex” Kutis (played by Emily De Margheriti), who knew Emma and Cecilia in their childhoods. (In the childhood flashback scenes, Alex is played by April Blasdall.) Through a series of events, viewers find out why there’s bad blood between Alex and Cecilia. It’s enough to say that in their childhoods, Alex was a rival to Cecilia to be Emma’s closest friend.
That rivalry opens up old emotional wounds, because Alex is now in Emma’s life as a close friend. On Alex’s social media, she describes Emma as her “best friend.” At this getaway trip, Cecilia is treated like an outsider, since she barely knows anyone in the group except for Emma and Alex. Emma’s friends are very superficial and catty, as they talk about people on social media and are preoccupied with watching a tacky reality dating show called “Paradise Lust.”
Alex delights in making Cecilia as uncomfortable as possible on this trip. For example, Alex smirks when telling Cecilia that Cecilia has to sleep on the couch because Emma didn’t tell Cecilia would be on this trip, and there are no more beds available. Alex also deliberately calls Cecilia her former childhood nickname “Sissy” numerous times, even though Cecilia politely corrects her and tells her that she no longer goes by the name Sissy, which has painful memories for Cecilia.
During a group dinner, Alex’s hostility toward Cecilia is on full display, when Alex belittles Cecilia for being a “public figure” who’s “profiting from people’s pain.” This remark comes after Tracey rudely asks Cecilia how much money she makes from being a social media influencer. Emma tries to keep the peace and says that it’s no one’s business how much money Cecilia makes. Meanwhile, Cecilia is visibly embarrassed by this barrage of disrespectful judgments about who she is from people she’s just met.
Alex also questions the ethics of anyone who gives self-help advice for a living but who’s not a trained and qualified professional in psychology. Even though Cecilia tells everyone that she’s upfront with her audience that she’s not a trained professional, Alex and eventually Jamie attempt to demean Cecilia to make her feel unworthy of her accomplishments. And to make Cecilia feel even more insecure, Alex mentions that Fran is studying to get her doctorate in psychology. Alex snipes to Cecilia, “Fran is helping real people with real problems.”
The story behind the shared history of Cecilia, Emma and Alex unfolds in layers to reveal why there’s so much resentment, jealousy and other negative feels that come out and affect what happens on this trip. The dialogue in this movie is both satirical and authentic when it comes to the psychological warfare that people can play on each other. All of the actors portray their roles with just enough parody to show viewers that “Sissy” is not a movie that’s taking itself too seriously.
“Sissy” has fun playing with some horror movie stereotypes, such as “terror in the woods” and a dimwitted cop who is called to the scene when the mayhem is in full swing. This cop’s name is Constable Martindale (played by Shaun Martindale), and he embodies the typical horror movie cop who arrives alone and has to make quick decisions on how to handle some chaos. The movie is also a hilariously brutal send-up of how people use social media in the worst ways.
As a low-budget movie, “Sissy” makes very good use of cinematography (by Steve Arnold) to convey certain moods. Certain pivotal scenes are bathed in an eerie crimson red. And the color pink is a constant presence in the movie, to conjure up the childhood friendship of Cecilia/Sissy and Emma as a reminder of not only their happy memories but also what went wrong to cause their long estrangement.
Before going on the getaway trip, Cecilia looks back on a childhood video of her and Emma where they were wearing pink wigs, so Cecilia decides to dye her hair pink. It’s a symbolic of how Cecilia wishes she could go back to this happy time in her life. “Sissy” also has an original score (by Kenneth Lambl) that also skillfully goes back and forth between whimsical and ominous, to reflect these contrasting moods in the movie.
But all of these elements really wouldn’t work as well without the performances of the cast members and the direction of the film, which get the tone of a satirical horror film just right. The heart of the movie (as well as the terror) is really about the cauldron of emotions stirred up when Cecilia, Emma and Alex are all on this unsettling trip together. Dee, Barlow and De Margheriti give the movie’s best performances as this trio of women coming to terms with their past. And because Cecilia is the most complex of these characters, Dee has the standout performance.
“Sissy” is not for viewers who are easily disturbed by seeing bloody violence in movies. However, for people who can tolerate this type of content, “Sissy” offers more than the usual horror movie clichés. It’s easy for horror movies to stage bloody death scenes that are messy. But what “Sissy” accomplishes is much harder: It shows in intriguing and sometimes uncomfortably funny ways how life, relationships and people’s inner psyches can be messy too.
UPDATE: Shudder and AMC+ will premiere “Sissy” on September 30, 2022.
