In the Mouth, the sophomore feature from Cory Santilli (Saul at Night, 2019) is everything from a film noir to a prison escape thriller to a surreal buddy comedy to a sentimental drama. It follows the hermetic Merl (Colin Burgess), a young man who refuses to go outside after a giant clone of his own head appears in his front lawn, intermittently announcing its presence in ominous, guttural moans. When Larry (Paul Rothery), whose noir-tinged escape from prison makes up the film’s striking cold open, shows up at Merl’s house in answer to his “roommate wanted” ad, Merl is confronted with forces that might finally allow him to confront his fears.
Santilli is clearly a fan of David Lynch, and the film wears that appreciation on its sleeve. The prison escape cold open gives way to Merl’s bedroom in typical Lynchian style; a rapid, handheld push into Merl’s sleeping face, accompanied by a loud whoosh. If the reference leans a little bit into replication, it’s certainly effective. Where Lynch’s Mullholland Dr., for example, suggests the duality of a Los Angeles that plays host both to dreams and the waking nightmares that live inside them, so too does In the Mouth posit that an entirely new world can quite literally be found inside yourself.
Lynchian influences aside, the intense, isolating shadows of the black-and-white photography and the camera’s canted angles all illustrate Merl’s instability without much unnecessary fanfare. The film possesses genuine confidence in its point of view, where being unmoored is part of the fabric of the film, rather than made up of tacked-on flourishes. What fanfare there is, like the giant clone of Merl’s head in the yard, is done practically, eschewing whatever cheap cgi effects a film of this budget might afford for something more real – essentially placing a filmed image of Burgess’s head in the frame that moves exactly as Merl moves. The cumulative effect of all this is direct and impactful, a world that is at once suggested to be something not of our own, but with a tactility, unfortunately for someone like Merl, that’s all too real.
Merl lives in a lonely, self-contained world of his own making. Terrified of going outside, he tries, sometimes pitifully, to live a normal life within the confines of his home. But after three months his landlord is hounding him for unpaid rent. Desperately in need of rent money, Merl accepts Larry, who just needs a place to hide out, into his house, though the constant news coverage of Larry’s prison escape puts him under constant fear that Merl might find him out. Little does Larry know that Merl is so lost inside his own troubled world that he never puts two and two together.
In their early days together, Merl’s eccentricities and Larry’s shadiness bounce off each other in a familiar, odd couple-esque comic register, the byproduct of which reveals a deeper sense of longing for companionship in the former, and a softer side in the latter. A very sweet scene, for example, shows Merl looking through binoculars inside the house as he instructs Larry which apples to pick from the orchard next door. But the idyll Merl and Larry seem to establish for themselves in the first two days of their cohabitation, of course, can’t survive. The news is still reporting on Larry’s escape, and when it seems like Merl might have a flash of recognition, Larry knows he has to do something. He tells his associates, who visit the house to bring him his share of the job they pulled and check on him, that Merl has set up cameras all around the house in fear of the escaped convict. Their instruction: put Merl “on ice.”
For his part, Burgess and Santilli portray Merl with the utmost sincerity; never belittling or making light of his anxieties, however unformed or vague they appear to be, which is a refreshing choice for a film whose increasingly desperate stakes and violent consequences could easily exploit such treatment. The giant head in Merl’s front yard might be a blunt metaphor for his personal problems, but as both a narrative and thematic device Santilli is able to get good mileage out of it. Having reached the brink of utter self-destruction, Merl can finally see that his means of healing, rather than of repression, are literally waiting for him in his front yard. The sheer strangeness of the sight of Merl walking into his own gaping mouth is enough for a few laughs, as is the film’s quite literally ascendent final sequence, but through Burgess’ portrayal, it bears the sincere inflection necessary to pull off its emotional punch.
Published as part of Slamdance Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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