Writer/director Brandon Daley is juggling a couple of very disparate tones in his new film $POSITIONS, an absurdist comedy that gradually transforms into a white-knuckle thriller about being poor in America in 2025. That he is able to pull this off is thanks in no small part to Michael Kunicki, a hugely talented, ingratiating performer whose expressionistic face displays an uncanny ability to smile in both happy and terrified ways. Kunicki plays small-town loser Mike Alvarado; we first meet him begging a receptionist to give him an extension on his brother Vinny’s (Vinny Kress) past-due hospital bills. Vinny is developmentally disabled, but their father’s health insurance has lapsed and the care Vinny needs has been cut off. Desperate, Mike takes Vinny to work with him, leaving him in the employee breakroom while he sneaks off to his desk and pretends that he wasn’t late.
Right off the bat, then, Daley is situating his characters in a very specific cultural and socioeconomic milieu: middle-Americans caught up in cycles of debt and low pay and a severely lacking social safety net. So it’s something of a miracle when Mike checks his crypto app and sees that his latest investment has spiked upwards of $30,000. He is elated, overwhelmed with joy, and so, of course, in the first of his many, many bad decisions, he immediately quits his job, buys his now former coworkers some expensive catering, and asks his long-suffering girlfriend Charlene (Kaylyn Carter) if she would be interested in an open relationship. But like stock market investing but on steroids, the peaks and valleys of crypto are wildly unpredictable, and before he knows it, his investment has bottomed out. He’s back to having nothing.
And so begins a roller coaster ride of Mike’s wildly vacillating fortunes, driving him insane in the process. Mike’s elderly, alcoholic father has a horrific accident — caused in large part by Mike giving him weed gummies as a substitute for booze — landing him in the hospital and quickly accumulating more medical debt. We then meet Mike’s cousin, Travis (Trevor Dawkins), a recovering addict fresh out of prison who Mike ropes into his scheme. For her part, Charlene agrees to the open relationship and quickly lands a lover, which horrifies Mike. Mike and Vinny also organize a yard sale to raise money for their dad’s treatments, but somehow get talked into selling the actual house, forcing them to move in with Travis and his young daughter.
In other words, it’s all absurd, although tinged with just enough verisimilitude to function as broadly realistic. Mike is a fount of good humor and boundless enthusiasm; each setback is met with a simple determination to try again until he gets it right. Daley clearly charts Mike’s gradual deterioration, where the debts mount up so much that even his cheerful façade begins to crumble. Of course, Mike is a gambling addict, facilitated by the ease of pressing buttons on a smartphone. It’s the gamification of addiction; as journalist Patrick Redford has written, “young people today live in a country… actively receding away from them. If they are lucky enough to get into a position to rack up six figures of student debt, they face bleak job prospects and prohibitively expensive housing costs… so why not play the viral lottery? Why not start gambling? Why not get involved in cryptocurrency speculation?” Sports fans in particular know how quickly legalized gambling has become embraced by the leagues which once shunned it as anathema to the game, while DraftKings and FanDuel spend millions of dollars on advertising and sponsorships that legitimizes them in the eyes of unsuspecting potential victims.
None of this is to say that Daley has his eye on a simple polemic; $POSITIONS is frequently hilarious, full of non-sequiturs and tomfoolery, almost like a long-lost Happy Madison production. Until, that is, the last act, when Mike finally hits it big to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The only problem is that someone has stolen his computer and external hard drive, and Mike can’t access his crypto wallet to sell high without them. Mike ruins several lives in his quest to find his stuff, his long journey into darkness punctuated by his phone app charting the real time progress of his fortune. So close yet so far away is the new normal in America, and $POSITIONS leaps headfirst and sometimes literally into this cruel reality.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 6.
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