The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick

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. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Zodiac Killer Project

Redux Redux

In Kevin and Matthew McManus’ Redux Redux, Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) vaults through an endless sequence of parallel realities, searching for a universe where her teenage daughter was not the victim of a local serial killer. When we’re introduced to this grieving mother, she has already exacted her vengeance on the perpetrator — a fry-cook named Neville (Jeremy Holm) by day — more times than she can count, with each gory recompense taking with it another chunk of her winnowing humanity. By this point, Irene has realized that her interdimensional travels are in vain, but she can’t seem to break this violent cycle. 

Enter Mia (Stella Marcus), a wayward girl who crosses paths with Irene in Neville’s lair. The strong-willed runaway instantly tips the film in a more conventional direction, giving Irene a sense of surrogate purpose, as well as someone to save. They bicker, part ways, and reunite on ostensibly begrudging terms, but at no point does the nature of their relationship seem volatile or unfamiliar. The brooding, sullen tone of Irene’s initial sci-fi-tinged spiral teases an arrestingly downbeat revenge fable, but the McManuses saddle their story with that most dishonest of film tropes: the precocious teen. 

Irene’s efforts to shelter Mia from a violent world predictably backfire, and the two become stranded in another universe when Irene’s high-tech transport chamber breaks down. The world of the film opens up, slightly, when they make contact with black market travel agents from Irene’s home world, “001” — the only universe to discover and capitalize on this mode of travel. The deal goes sour when the sinister sellers try to make off with Irene’s superior machine, and Mia finally proves her worth in a tight spot, losing a bit of her innocence in the process. Her experiences motivate the story’s expanding perspective, but her blatantly telegraphed dramatic function reduces the narrative’s circuitous pathways to variations on the same redundant clause.

Redux Redux combines tropes willfully, but not strategically. Its scrappy combination of the burnt-out multiverse trend and the time-loop structure of a film like Groundhog Day is emblematic of its generic and dramatic shortcomings; not only does it render the screenplay’s pseudoscience muddled and contradictory — Mia learned about multiverse theory in a creative writing class, after all — it also limits the film’s grim preoccupations with grief and guilt into the confines of borrowed frameworks. There are flashes of ingenuity throughout, but they are assimilated into a narrative that, like its protagonist, only has one place to go. Short of thrills, surprises, or any novel psychological textures, Redux Redux has little to do but schlep along as well as it can on an empty fuel tank. — ALEXANDER MOONEY

Ash

“In the sci-fi-horror film Ash, an ethnically and geographically diverse group of astronauts is dispatched to the farthest corners of the galaxy as Earth’s last hope. They’ve been entrusted with finding a new home suitable for repopulation as their old one is in its death throes, suffering under ecological disaster. Yet something has gone horribly wrong: having landed their spaceship on an alien planet, the entire crew — save our “final girl” — has been massacred aboard the vessel. Afflicted with amnesia, our surviving character has only spotty recollections of what happened, but is consumed with the belief that the crew was overtaken by contamination and that nobody was who they seemed. Paranoia takes hold…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — ANDREW DIGNAN

Dead Lover

Writer-director-actress Grace Glowicki hasn’t yet ascended to the same level of indie prestige as Kate Lyn Sheil, Deragh Campbell, or (now mainstream power player) Greta Gerwig, but if there’s any justice in this world, she soon will. After co-starring in a number of low-budget, resolutely small-scale films, she’s now released her second directorial effort. Her debut, 2019’s Tito, was a disturbingly odd bit of provocation, a sorta-cringe comedy built entirely around Glowicki’s twitchy, nervous (and hilarious) lead performance. Her latest, Dead Lover, raises the bar in every way: it’s bigger, much broader, delightfully gross, and even funnier than her debut. 

As the title might suggest, and an opening title card quoting Mary Shelley confirms, Dead Lover is a Frankenstein riff. Glowicki is a local gravedigger, desperate for love but rebuffed by all for her dirty clothes and pungent odor. She eventually meets a sailor (played by Glowicki’s real-life husband and frequent collaborator Ben Petrie) who is intoxicated by her scent, and they fall madly in love. But he is soon lost at sea, leaving behind only a single severed finger. Determined to bring back her beau, Glowicki embarks on a series of experiments to resurrect him. Eventually, she combines the dead lover’s finger with the corpse of a nobleman’s deceased wife. The experiment is only a partial success, and soon the widowed nobleman is made aware that his wife’s corpse has been reanimated. This brings him into conflict with the gravedigger, who is also distraught that her newly revived lover has lost interest in her. 

This cursory plot summary doesn’t do justice to just how outright odd Dead Lover is; filmed in a deliberately artificial manner on obvious black box sound stages, the whole thing has a handmade, home-crafted feel to it — something like Hot Topic Jo-Ann Fabrics. Working with cinematographer Rhayne Vermette and shooting on 16mm film, Dead Lover evokes at various stages everything from Kenneth Anger to Universal Monster movies from the ‘30s to Guy Maddin to even the chintzy chiaroscuro of Albert Serra’s Liberté. There are puppets, fake plastic laboratory equipment, fog machines, and lots of red and green filters. Amusingly, this mixture of minimalism and artifice extends even to the naming of characters, where Glowicki is credited only as “gravedigger,” Petrie is simply “lover,” the nobleman, played by Lowen Morrow, is “widower,” and the wife’s corpse is merely “dead opera singer.” 

It’s also a randy, pro-sex film, with each actor gleefully crossdressing and gender-swapping as they all take turns playing other small roles.  The whole thing has a macabre theater-kid energy, blessed with a purity of desire to put on a show and make themselves laugh. The energy is infectious, as they say, and everyone is having a blast donning costumes, fake mustaches, and trying out funny accents with wild abandon. There’s some extremely funny slapstick embedded here, as well as plenty of absurdist sight gags (the gravedigger’s initial experiment only succeeds in making the severed finger several feet long, but conscious, and so she naturally, promptly, masturbates with it). It’s a lark of a film, a winning trifle that’s sure to become some sort of cult favorite for those quick to attune to its unique wavelength, and a must-watch for fans of DIY aesthetics and campy vamping. — DANIEL GORMAN

Cloud

“Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been arguably the greatest filmmaker of the last decade, his works across this period constituting one of the most impressive contemporary bodies of work from a veteran filmmaker, one as dedicated to remixing his own work in late auteur style as he is retaining the fresh experimental bent of a much younger director. Martin Scorsese and Hong Sang-soo may be the only other filmmakers who have also been able to accomplish a similar feat this far into their careers. While Kurosawa’s medium-length film Chime, which made the rounds earlier this year, took its cues from his turn-of-the-century masterpieces Cure and Pulse, distilling them both into a pure expression of unnameable yet deeply resonant dread, Cloud seems…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — SEAN GILMAN

40 Acres

Given the real-life horrors of a global pandemic and an increasingly hostile socio-political climate, it’s no wonder that post-apocalyptic fiction is as en vogue as ever, with recent notable films as Elevation, the Quiet Place trilogy, and HBO’s The Last of Us series currently at the fore of the subgenre. Art is having a blast imitating life, and next up is 40 Acres, the feature debut of writer/director R.T. Thorne. Imagining a world in total ruin following the traumatic loss of nearly all animal life, the most obvious initial drawback is that the director does not nearly have the budget to realize the available scope of this potentially epic scenario, and so instead largely confines the proceedings to a single location. Market saturation is also an issue, with many of 40 Acres elements feeling largely derivative of other films that have preceded it. But what Thorne does have is a strong sense of character, favoring a more intimate approach to focus his efforts on the indomitable spirit of a single family that has survived where the world has not. 40 Acres supplies the requisite genre thrills, but is actually more interested in the study of dramatic interpersonal relations, and the way people attempt to maintain a life of normalcy as danger lurks around every corner.

An opening text crawl informs us that 14 years ago, 98% of the world’s fauna was decimated by an ecological disaster. The ensuing global food shortage sparked a second Civil War, with famine driving the most desperate to cannibalism. In rural Canada, the Freemans have endured this harsh new world by keeping to their self-sustaining farm, a secured, fenced-in property passed down from African American farmers who had settled there in the 1870s. De facto mother Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler) and father Galen (Michael Greyeyes) uphold routines of schooling and domesticity, ensuring that Manny (Kataem O’Connor), Raine (Leenah Robinson), and Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc) receive a proper education despite a seemingly improbable future. Meanwhile, Manny grows increasingly curious about the outside world — as older teens in these speculative scenarios are wont to do — finding himself drawn to Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas), a young woman he spies on his hunting excursions. When Dawn shows up at the Freeman’s farm, injured by unseen forces, Manny brings her inside, which threatens to disrupt the Freemans’ lives and put everyone in grave danger.

Thorne is superb with introductions, plunging the audience into the immediate nightmare of 40 Acres’ reality, orchestrating a thrilling opening sequence that finds a gang of terrifying, heavily-armed cannibals infiltrating the Freeman farm, seeking out food and supplies. Their mission is cut short, as the Freeman family demonstrates their skills of combat and coordinated attack to defend their land, slaying all incoming foes with ease. This sequence is also the first of several learning moments for the Freeman kids, with the number one lesson being never to waste a bullet when a knife will do the trick. Thorne then steps away from violence for a while, delving into the daily schedule and rhythms of the Freemans, who fill their days with cooking, cleaning, schooling, and manual labor on the farm, all managed by the genial Galen and no-nonsense, tough-as-nails Hailey. From here, 40 Acres is separated into chapters, navigating an achronological structure to gradually reveal histories and motives prior to the collapse of humanity, as Hailey, a former soldier, struggles to reintegrate back into civilization, breaking down the wall between herself and Manny, her own biological son.

At nearly two hours in length, 40 Acres does suffer from drag in its midsection, slowing the pace to a crawl while the Freemans work out how to deal with the Dawn situation — which is already a familiar development for films where hunkering down is the survival strategy of choice. Visually speaking, the film doesn’t offer anything new or innovative in the realm of post-apocalyptic thrillers; if you’ve seen one person trekking through a heavily wooded area with a rifle, you’ve seen them all. Thankfully, Thorne does bounce back for a climactic showdown, entering siege mode to pit the blended family of African American and Indigenous Freemans against an invading horde of White cannibals. It’s a potent and stimulating third act, sold with conviction and cathartic sequences of violence, including one nifty shootout that occurs in pitch-blackness as the action is illuminated solely by muzzle flashes. And all of this is aided by uniformly strong performances, though the film belongs to Deadwyler, who commands the screen with terrific work as a vengeful matriarch, turning in one of the most compelling performances of the year. So while 40 Acres has its undeniable limitations, Thorne mitigates flaws both fiscal and conceptual through sturdy execution, delivering a genuinely arresting look at what life might look like after everything finally — or, further — goes to hell.  — JAKE TROPILA