When 20-something pianist Donna (Dana Namerode) receives a diagnosis of bone cancer in her hand, she explores different avenues for physical and mental health treatment, including alternative new age therapy involving crystals, a support group meeting led by Laketa Caston’s Linda (who has cancer herself and stresses acceptance), and an oncologist whose recommended course of action is an amputation as soon as possible. While waiting for an appointment to discuss the latter, she meets Rishi (Nik Dodani), a stand-up comic presumably also receiving cancer treatment, and Sam (Johnny Whitworth), who claims to be a purveyor of yet another alternative treatment. Not wanting to lose her hand to the cancer, believing that would end her ability to play piano, Donna entertains Sam’s proposal. She soon learns that he is something of a rogue quantum physicist, and from there unfolds a familiar story of human technology reaching into unknowable dimensions and finding horror, in conversation with such films as Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond.
Where much of Calvin Lee Reeder’s body of work has focused on horror and sci-fi intersecting with comedy, including a number of tight short films that culminate in single jokes, the horror/sci-fi rubs up in The A-Frame against a cancer drama — a combination which brings out both strengths and weaknesses. Where many cosmic horror films might focus squarely on the Promethean scientist, here we spend more time with his cancer-ridden human test subjects. We build a quite emotional connection to Rishi in particular, whose constant bad jokes cover a debilitating fear of the unknown after death and endear us to him, strengthened by a solid performance from Dodani. But the genre mashup also leads to some spinning wheels, where support group meetings and moments of detailed backstory tend to drag on a bit. Even so, the hit-or-miss drama lays the foundation for the moments of horror to really pop.
After an apparently successful treatment for Donna, in which a small quantum chamber dips her hand into another dimension and pulls it back sans cancer, Sam, of course, needs to ramp up his experiments. He enlists Donna to quietly spread his gospel and recruit people with cancers worse than hers. The small device was just a prototype for the titular A-Frame, a large pod with some resemblance to those in The Fly and Altered States. Where the prior sleeve-like device was built for test-rats and localized human cancers, the larger one fires the whole human through the other dimension and back into this one, aiming to rid the body of cancers in more advanced stages. This too-quick snowballing of experimental scale leads to gruesome, bloody consequences with some brief but excellent creature effects, and some truly alarming screams by Namerode.
Each “quantum cycle” sequence is shot (by Brandt Hackney) and edited (by Zach Clark) with an imaginative DIY spirit, using simple means to craft some striking images, such as faces quick-cutting around the frame and composited on top of one another in a feedback pattern, with mirrored faces sharing an eye, emphasizing the dimensional splits taking place. Once things start to get out of hand, even the idle connecting shots of the landscapes between locations begin to feature quietly impossible geometries like street lights populating the sky, composed matter-of-factly. David Wingo’s score shines too, finding diegetic resonance with the in-world, wavefolded oscillations of the A-Frame itself, which Sam describes as a “snoring,” giving the machine a sinister anthropomorphism.
These set pieces are worth the wait, and do tend to work wonders at getting under the viewer’s skin, despite some considerable unevenness in balancing the film’s human drama with its horror. While there’s the lingering sense that there’s a more consistent nightmare of a film just out of reach, Reeder and his cast and crew accomplish quite a bit with their modest resources, and the film stands as a spirited entry in the tradition it occupies.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 5.
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