MIFF Session #8: SOMETHING IN THE DIRT

A pair of down and out-ers find themselves in the same run down apartment block in L.A. and get to talking. The newcomer Levi goes off with the promise of furniture for his new place until he goes into the country to live. While both are helping with the couches and chairs they notice that a bizarrely shaped glass or crystal that Levi has found in the flat has levitated and cast strange patterns on the wall. As both are out of luck but intrigued they decide to record it and see if they can make a documentary about it for a streaming giant. It does happen again and they arm themselves with recording equipment as more weirdness starts taking place. As we see this we are also informed, through a series of talking head interviews that the documentary they have been making has not gone to plan and involved tragedy. Someone among the original duo and the expanding cast and crew has died.

Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead have made a career making big concept movies on tiny budgets. Instead of going along Roger Corman lines of fashioning miniature mainstream outings they've followed the more arthouse or mumblecore style by which a flat video look or strained visual effect is played for real and takes gravitas from its humble circumstances. Resolution was mostly a dialogue but expanded to include a well described spiral of phenomena around a plain story of one friend detoxing another. Spring was like Splash for fans of H.P. Lovecraft. The Endless notched everything up with a more complicated universe that accommodated something of the debut in its expansion. While this was progressing, the duo was assisting other film makers with like minds to add to the universe with small but impressive outings like She Dies Tomorrow or After Midnight. Then Benson and Morehead made the more mainstream Synchronic with a higher profile cast and a more focussed time travel plot. It was not received with the joy from the fanbase that all the others and the offshoots had been. My take on that is that it was considered an overreach, too much budget but not enough for the look and feel to lift them into the mainstream celestium, a kind of unintended sellout. I liked the film but understood why fans of the duo didn't. 

Something in the Dirt feels like a way of rebooting the style to include the rich enthusiasm of the earlier films with the pleasure of higher production values. The catch is that it's their most claustrophobic piece yet, caging us in with the two characters (played by Benson and Morehead themselves as they did in The Endless). It's like a one for them/on for us deal except you get both of those at once. In a way, it's a little like an autobiographical sketch of the partnership itself as it has to do with the ambition to create extraordinary things with scant means with the slick to-camera interviews serving as a reminder of what it might look like on Netflix or Shudder.

While we're dealing with that we are watching the constant threat to the project through each character's vulnerability. John is part of an evangelical Christian apocalyptic sect with eyes on a coming apocalypse. He keeps unearthing new details about Levi's police record and institutional life. There are tough reckoning moments for both at the hands of the other while a general passive area is maintained by both new friends. While John sees a new face of electro-magnetism, Levi thinks the phenomena are making him defy gravity. All this is fuelled by a series of discoveries that might as easily be coincidences as connections. Perhaps it's a kind of lockdown story where simple and reasonable complaints fermented into big stinky conspiracy theories and bizarre redrafts of concepts like freedom. We are in there with them almost exclusively for nearly two hours. 

 I recently saw Jordan Peele's Nope, a large scale seamlessly produced epic of sci-horror. It had a good-sized pot of concepts which it fulfilled impeccably in a self-aware blockbuster fashion. It was clever and huge and had a lot to say about the pursuit of spectacle and the way that's done in movies. In the narrowest of justifications for the comparison, Id put it up against the far more ragged Something in the Dirt with its breathless trialling of pattern vs coincidence any day. Peele marshalled massive resources for his piece and deserves the accolades he's raking in. But for me, I left the cinema for the Benson and Morehead movie with the sense of it expanding as I let it settle into form. Between the two, give me the punky take over the slick one every time. But that's just me.