Worth: $17.00
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Cast:
Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson
Intro:
… stripped back filmmaking that proves that an excellent concept doesn’t require an expansive and expensive physical canvass to produce extraordinary art.
Anyone familiar with the tour-de-force directing duo Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson will know that almost everything they produce is going to stretch the limits of imagination even on the smallest budget. Whether they’re making films about a mythical monster romance such as Spring, an obsessed cult in The Endless, or a drug that allows time travel in Synchronic – the pair are amongst the best working in the speculative fiction genre in America. It’s little wonder that their latest work Something in the Dirt is a mind-bending piece of guerrilla filmmaking that asks more questions than it can possibly answer – but what fascinating questions they are!
The bare bones plot of Something in the Dirt revolves around two Los Angeles residents living in a dilapidated apartment complex who notice that something extraordinary is happening in one of the apartments. The residents are ex-math teacher turned wedding photographer, John Daniels (Aaron Moorhead) and bartender and beach dude, Levi Danube (Justin Benson). They “meet” when Levi bums a cigarette off John and amiable banter leads to John divulging that he’s broken up with his husband and offering Levi some furniture for his temporary digs. Overhead planes fly low, a fire rages on a hill. Benson and Moorhead’s L.A. is as oppressive as it is expansive. John jokes that someone murdered the tenant in Levi’s apartment, which is why it hasn’t been rented out in over ten years. Levi takes him seriously, and why not? As one character relates “L.A. is like Halloween every day of the year.”
There is something wrong with Levi’s apartment. There is a door that won’t close, bizarre mathematical symbols written on the walls, a closet that emanates a dangerous amount of heat, and it appears that gravity’s laws don’t apply there. A crystal ashtray begins to levitate and cast uncanny reflections on the walls. Although initially freaked out by what they see, Levi and John decide that whatever it is might just be their ticket to a better life if they can document the footage and maybe sell it to Netflix.
Just when you think you have a handle on what is happening (two guys try to make sense of an inexplicable phenomenon), Benson and Moorhead pull the rug from beneath you. The film introduces a meta documentary element that casts doubt on every interaction between the two and what, if anything at all, they saw.
Playfulness isn’t a property that people would generally associate with Benson and Moorhead, certainly not outright comedy, but Something in the Dirt is their most genre defying work to date. The film references the propensity for “rabbit hole” conspiracy thinking. “What’s crazier?” John asks, “Believing every coincidence you see, or ignoring them?” John is a true believer, although in what changes rapidly. He’s a member of an Evangelical Doomsday church (he defends genocide) and takes his ideas from various internet sources and half-recalled podcasts. Levi is more grounded but the seductive nature of solving a mystery (especially if it has a cash payoff) is something he can’t ignore. He points out that John is getting into some “Dan Brown” territory with his thinking, and it’s all getting very X-Files.
Conspiracies abound in Something in the Dirt. Is what is happening in Levi’s apartment an alien presence? Is it some electromagnetic disturbance? Is it the result of L.A. being built around a centuries old mathematical equation by an occultist architect named William Thompson? What do the numbers 1908 represent, and why do they lead the protagonists to discover new evidence that bolsters theories and then go nowhere? The point Benson is making in his screenplay is that once a theory is exhausted, there is always another to take up. L.A. has been populated by a series of “out there” thinkers, from Jack Parsons to Jim Morrison, the cityscape is replete with urban legends…
The central conceit of Something in the Dirt is so fascinating that you often forget that you’re watching two guys chain-smoking and riffing on weird stuff. To enliven the proceedings, the directors cleverly insert documents from their own childhoods. The film plays with the idea of found footage but also subverts it as it goes further along. There is no telling what is ‘real’ in the film because the conception relies on a post-truth understanding of media.
Something in the Dirt pulsates with the weirdness expected of a Benson and Moorhead film but it also manages to get a lot of truths across despite the characters and film constantly lying. It’s also enormously amusing (watch out for a great cameo by Issa Lopez, director of Tigers Are Not Afraid) despite some quite discombobulating scenes. Something in the Dirt is stripped back filmmaking that proves that an excellent concept doesn’t require an expansive and expensive physical canvass to produce extraordinary art.