Rating: 3.5/5
Criterion Challenge 2022 | 34/52 | Midnight Madness: Cult Movies
A monster on the bed. Well, on the TV that Keith is watching, he also happens to be in bed. Keith’s phone rings. A crying voice on the other end—his girlfriend, Laura, sitting in her car downstairs. He rides with her, trying to tell her how he never cried as a child, but he stumbles and stutters over his words. Laura gets out of the car to grab something from the gas station. Keith holds his eyes open, trying to force himself to cry. When Laura gets in, he wipes away the tears as though distraught.
Keith brings Laura back to his apartment. She gets on the bed, turns to face the wall, and continues to cry. Keith spends a long time trying to think of what to do. Finally, he puts socks on his hands, gets under the bed, and puts on a sock puppet show. Laura looks on, confused, picking at her irritated face. Keith doesn’t have a mirror, but he does have a metal spatula. Laura pokes at her irritated skin before reminding Keith that she’s allergic to down — his pillows are down. But Laura just lays back down and rubs her face into the pillowcase-less down pillow. When he tries to stop her, she stabs him with a thumbtack she pulled from the wall.
The next day, Laura silently leaves, and Keith goes to work. He sits in the back of an unmarked white van with several socially awkward nerds. Keith tries to apologize to his boss, Carmine, but Carmine is profoundly uninterested in Keith’s personal life and far too impatient to sit while Keith stumbles through his words. So, Carmine drops Keith off so he can do his job: selling coupons door-to-door, which ostensibly helps people affected by multiple sclerosis.
The film follows Keith’s misadventures as he alienates everyone around him.
— Has it ever occurred to you that your ridiculous, disjointed splutterings might inspire me to want to malign you? That I might deliberately not pay the bill just to punish you for torturing me with your pathologies? I'm just throwing it out there. — I appreciate that.
Keith’s inability to communicate may trap him in social isolation, but everyone’s self-absorbed antipathy towards him drives him further into his erratic confabulation.
Keith is not the only awkward character—everyone around him is terrible at communication, further putting Keith in a trapped sense of social isolation.
Sean Price Williams’s manic cinematography makes every scene feel intense, but with nowhere for that energy to go, it feels stressful and awkward. It’s like turning the heat on high after the rice has already absorbed the water. Both Sean Price Williams and director Ronald Bronstein regularly collaborate with the Safdie Brothers, if that gives you a hint at the movie’s tense filmmaking.
The score consists of slimy synths with sci-fi twirls, which further add to the movie’s off-kilter, uncomfortable tone.
Maybe I have a terrible sense of humor, but I found this quite funny in that painful way. Dore Mann’s over-explanatory awkwardness is pitch-perfect.