Filmmaker Pete Ohs’ working methods prioritize flexibility, openness, and spontaneity. As with all of his features so far, his latest, The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, began with a loose outline anchored around one location, was fleshed out scene-by-scene the day of shooting, and was shot chronologically. This strategy positions Ohs and his company of actors as an American equivalent to Hong Sang-soo, in production methods if not necessarily in thematic interests, and has made Ohs’ consistent output (five features in five years) possible.
Tick came to Ohs when, staring into the New England countryside, he was suddenly overcome by a fear of tick bites. This perfectly rational fear was the seed of inspiration that grew into the story of Yvonne (Zoe Chao), a grieving, guilt-stricken woman who visits her friend (and, we later learn, former lover) Camille’s (Callie Hernandez) countryside home for a weekend of restoration, only to find that she is nothing like she remembers, and her new, live-in companions, AJ and Isaac (James Cusati-Moyer and Jeremy O. Harris, respectively), harbor mysterious, possibly sinister, intentions.
The real house in which Tick takes place actually belongs to Hernandez, which she purchased with the goal of making as many microbudget films as possible. Those who have seen it will recognize the house from Hernandez and Courtney Stephens’ soon-to-be-released, conspiracy-laden, docu-hybrid Invention. It bears a number of architectural quirks, two of which — a peculiar diagonal window used to unmoor the viewer’s sense of perspective, and a hole in the floor of the upstairs bedroom, itself an era-specific method of heat distribution, that later becomes a vessel for paranoia — feature prominently in the film. While the house lives out in the Berkshires, in Tick no indication as to its location is ever given. The result is a film with a distinct sense of placelessness and timelessness, useful qualities considering Camille, AJ, and Isaac have deliberately detached themselves from the hustle and bustle of the city for a more relaxed lifestyle devoid of fear and anxiety.
Yvonne’s mental state takes a further dive when she’s bitten by a tick after a walk in the woods, which are evocatively filmed by Ohs himself to feel like one half-step apart from the real world. Amidst Yvonne’s growing fear of the tick bite, Camille’s previously comforting demeanor carries an air of brainless detachment, and AJ’s holistic eating and alternative medicinal advice just disgusts and frustrates her. Isaac’s perspective on the beauty of this countryside utopia is more comforting to Yvonne, whose physical state deteriorates significantly while fighting the effects of the bite, but his coldness after a failed game night is just another alienating element to an already bizarre stay.
Ohs imbues the film with a sense of calm that acts as both placation and deception. His largely static camera guides the viewer through long, voyeuristic takes. The only real departures from this mode come when the viewer adopts Yvonne’s perspective. Here, it’s as if the camera is mounted to her shoulder, distorting her face out to the edges of the frame; the editing becomes more panicked and instinctual to match. Isabella Summers’ original score of low and high drones also slows down the pace and lulls the viewer into a similar sense of calm, while Danny Madden’s sound design introduces digital scratches and static to suggest an insect-like presence lurking underneath.
Chao’s performance is a crucial grounding element in a film that takes increasingly fanciful flights away from realism. She introduces Yvonne with the puffy face of someone who appears to have been sobbing for the entire journey, and plays her grief as a kind of stupor. Next to Hernandez, Harris, and Cusati-Moyer, who are almost impossibly relaxed (they have nothing to fear, it will be repeatedly emphasized throughout the film), Yvonne’s numbness sticks out. It will be the soothing trio’s mission to make Yvonne feel just like them.
It wouldn’t be fair to give anything away about the plot of Tick, because it does veer in some unexpected directions that recall both Rosemary’s Baby and Get Out. But the film isn’t without its problems, and one senses, in this instance, that Ohs’ trademark methods of conception and production haven’t allowed this film’s cumbersome ideas and obvious metaphors to gestate properly. Unlike Ohs’ previous features — his breakout Jethica (2022, also starring Hernandez) and the underseen Love and Work (2024) — which possess a confidence in story and concept that never negatively implies their spontaneous origins, Tick almost announces the fact that its story was made up as it went along.
These issues come to a head in Tick’s final moments, when its wellness-lifestyle satire, its body horror, and its queer/feminist social commentary reveal their flimsy conceptual foundations. One of the reasons for these issues is a confused treatment of the role fear plays as a thematic lynchpin. Yvonne never really displays signs of fear until she’s bitten by the tick, understandable given the medical implications of such a bite. But there’s too much emphasis on this fear, given how much more clearly guilt and grief motivate her decisions. It’s no surprise, either, that those are the emotions Chao most effectively conveys. As the story’s elements — all of which expand on metaphors about queerness, alternative family models, and women’s bodies — depart the world of realism, this lack of conviction about where exactly Yvonne’s fear comes from (and even why it comes at all) uncovers some of the larger cracks in the film’s overall concept. The result is a finale of confused and competing tones that might spark some puzzled conversations, but which don’t provide firm enough ground on which the film itself can stand.
Published as part of Overlook Film Fest 2025.
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