by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $14.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Peter Falls, Michelle Ortiz, Robbie Arnett, Sydney Winbush, Corbin Bernsen
Intro:
… tragically hilarious and revoltingly sad.
Oliver Bernsen likes to get right into the guts of things. Over the past decade and a half, he has made a handful of short films that are as scrappy as they are gross, from the freakshow fever dream When We Get to Heaven, to the based-on-actual-events surgical comedy Connective Tissue, to essentially a 10+ minute wind-up for a singularly weird showing of practical effects in Memory Box. And now that he’s finally gotten together the means for a full feature, with him and his family handling large amounts of the production themselves, his grotesque slant on the world is weirder than ever.
Right from its title shot of a nebulous, fleshy hole shitting out the cocoon of the titular creature, this is profoundly icky stuff. Following hammer salesman Carroll (Peter Falls) after he accidentally steps on a rusty nail, his visage becomes more and more decayed, eyes swelling shut and bloodshot. Falls himself exudes raw red flag energy throughout, and the practical effects progressively turn him into something that crawled off the set of Kuso. That goes double for the set design of his house, full of rotted wood and fleshy growths, effectively making any given dwelling in Trainspotting look like a McMansion by comparison. Add to that the numerous medical-grade shots of Carroll’s internal organs and… well, if you plan on seeing this, leave the snacks for another time.
At its core, Bagworm is basically a genre exaggeration of toxic masculinity, taken to the extreme of a literal toxin that breaks down Carroll’s body and mind. The script from Henry Bernsen (Oliver’s brother) details out all manner of thought patterns and social cues that feel pulled right out of the Manosphere, from his increasingly disastrous interactions with women (like, ‘let me vividly describe how I would murder you’ levels of disastrous), to his apocalyptic perspective on humanity and the world, to regularly drinking mouthwash for the proof. So many justifications and copes just to avoid realising where the real problem is; it’s “men will literally ___ instead of going to therapy” on designer drugs.
While the commentary itself isn’t anything groundbreaking, and even the practical effects might come across tame for those spoiled by the more excessive edges of the genre, the way they meld together here offers not only truly unsettling sequences beyond the gore and squalor, but some solid bleak comedy as well. Carroll’s buckwild attempts at adulting and talking to other people initially hit like a punch to the breadbasket, and then they form a larger caricature of the sort of blokes that have been spending the last several years arguing amongst themselves, with seeming sincerity, about whether having sex with women is gay. And like the best caricatures, it only exaggerates features that are already there, giving a face to someone for whom ‘you need to clean your room’ is less about hygiene and more about survival
Bagworm is tragically hilarious and revoltingly sad. It plunges knee-deep into what is frequently termed the ‘male loneliness epidemic’, and uses figurative and literal ugliness to show it for the self-inflicted malady it’s always been. It admittedly is likely to run into the same problem that even the greatest treatises on toxic masculinity end up facing (the people who most need to see it either won’t or will take all the wrong lessons from it), but as a novel and impressively repulsive take on familiar material, it aims for an alarmingly prevalent genre of men who make their neuroses into everyone else’s problem and hits the necrotic target dead-on.
