One of the unexpected joys of the CineJoy film festival. The movie is billed as a windy cult vampire horror film, but is actually a lot more romantic and experimental than it appears. The first and final acts are some of the most interest cinematic choices: we have an extended montage of our main character Will’s monotony, his dead end, alienating job, finally broken up by a colorfully coiffed stranger with an exotic accent that stumbles into his life. From there the movie transforms into a bit of a romance for long enough to lull you into a false sense of security, until Brit finds Will’s pill bottles in a bedside drawer and learns that he’s similar dissatisfied with his life. Then the movie takes a hard left turn into snuff film territory as Brit invites Will to basically a suicide cult party where everything goes awry.
Act Two sneaks up on you as we adjust our time back to the start of the movie from a new perspective and rewatch the events from Brit’s vantage point. There are some big payoffs for us emotionally and in terms of storytelling. It feels a little bit like the mid season twist in Netflix’s Russian Doll. The final act has some of the coolest fight scenes I’ve seen in a while: as Will is struggling with a serum he’s ingested, he starts to experience blackouts that have him split between three or four different moments of time simultaneously, so we watch him get punched by a guy at a compound and then get knocked into a fridge at a 7-11 and fall to the ground under a highway overpass. The movie commits to the scene fully and the effect is an absolute winner. I’m not normally a huge fan of movies that flirt so hard with death by shitty life suicide themes, but there are some ways in which this movie’s subject matter and delivery redeem it and excuse some of the more self-serious moments.
