Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Josh Stifter, Daniel Degnan, Keith Radichel, Nathan Strauss
Intro:
… a disarmingly interesting indie that will please those looking for something a bit different.
YouTuber Dom (Josh Stifter) lives a relatively shallow life in his mum’s basement, where he makes videos about cryptids. Barely breaking double digits in viewership, the most popular video is of him being attacked by bees while on the hunt for Bigfoot. The only person who shares his passion for the bizarre is his best friend, Miles (Keith Radichel), and even he’s losing patience with Dom’s Ahab-esque pursuit of that one hunt that will make it all worthwhile.
However, when it looks like Dom is set to finally put his hopes and digital dreams to bed, he receives a mysterious package in the mail. One which sends him and Miles off to the grounds of Doug Greywood (Daniel Degnan), a creepy landowner who looks disarmingly like Aunty Donna’s Broden Kelly.
Directed by Stifter and co-written with Degnan, Greywood’s Plot starts as a sort of American Movie for the social media generation. Like Mark Borchardt, Dom doesn’t grasp what his filmmaking strengths are, much to the frustration of others. When he’s not being chased by bees, his videos primarily see him standing in front of a whiteboard. Hardly high art, but for Dom they are everything. Once we arrive at the titular plot, the film continues to ramp up the slacker comedy as the boys pontificate about the macabre and bizarre. At times, Stifter punctures these moments with animated vignettes narrated by Miles, who’s never able to cite the exact source of his truer than true stories.
So far, so Clerks in the wilderness.
However, once the boys stumble over indubitable evidence of something going bump in the night, Greywood’s Plot turns sharply into Lovecraftian body horror.
Being a horror film, the audience expects something calamitous to happen to our two leads. And yet, the speed with which everything happens, and the sudden change of tone will break your neck.
Is that a criticism? Not really. It’s an acknowledgement of how Stifter successfully uses the film’s microbudget to his advantage. It would have the same impact if Liv Tyler started stalking and hunting all her colleagues at Empire Records.
The languid pacing of the first two acts leads you into a false sense of security, so you best hope you’re not in the splash zone when the blood starts to fly. Sure, you wouldn’t want to share an afternoon with the man-child that is Dom, but you wouldn’t wish this fate on him.
In hindsight, there is an itchy feeling at the back of the brain that, even at 80 minutes, the film could do with a trim. Perhaps it’s a grim desire to trim off the fat so that Stifter can play around more with the macabre scenario he has set up for Dom, Miles and Greywood. Either way, this is a disarmingly interesting indie that will please those looking for something a bit different.
