Theodore Schaefer’s sophomore feature announces itself right from the jump, with a free-flowing camera flying, crashing, and zooming through modern New York City as if it were the Paris streets of Breathless and Elevator to the Gallows. And like Jean-Luc Godard and Louis Malle’s debuts, The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight makes its black-and-white images burst with energy through a combination of a frenetic editing style and rollicking jazz soundtrack. This technical trifecta of Alex Huggins’ contrasty 16mm cinematography, Zach Clark’s raucous editing, and Scott Lane’s playful compositions (there are a couple repeated notes that feel like the music is about to dive into a riff on “Take Five”) come together to make Arrow a film of pure exuberance.
Just as playful as the style is Schaefer’s loose narrative, where three seemingly unconnected stories — each starring Gus Birney as an apparently different character — weave around each other, threaded by bookends of an old woman with a suitcase (Constance Shulman, Birney’s real-life mother) constantly having fleeting sightings of her exact doppelganger. The first story sees Birney as Violet, who works at an arcade that is apparently only frequented by the elderly, and fills her time by trying to come up with small-time, quick cash crimes and cons with her coworker Em (Jack Haven).
25 minutes into Arrow, Birney reappears as Sinopia, a mysterious socialite working through her relationships. If Arrow wasn’t already formally fluid enough, this middle section is where it starts to drop any of its rules, and shows the movie as able to transform into anything it wants in an instant. In particular, there is a great sequence here going up and down and up and down in an elevator, where the film takes another sudden swing at its diegesis as the absurdity starts to set in. It is also a scene of one of the film’s many great minor roles, where Gus’ cousin Albert Birney (the Baltimore-based filmmaker behind OBEX) plays the increasingly frustrated elevator operator whom Sinopia refers to as “Sisyphus.”
Around every corner of the film is another trick up Schaefer’s sleeve, something which the movie even winks at when Gus Birney appears in the final chapter as Jade, a hustler looking to cheat her way through a big poker game run by Flush Derringer (Babak Tafti) — a name that, when it’s first spoken, makes one realize there is a Pynchonian air to Arrow, with the about-town oddities in particular calling to mind V. What makes Arrow such a joy to watch, though, isn’t necessarily the literal content of its stories, but how much vitality it has in every instant. This is held together by how exciting Birney is to watch as she stretches her acting chops in every direction, and it’s no wonder that in the moments when Schaefer slows down and gets serious, it’s always because the acting on screen becomes more exciting than anything the camera can do.
Suffice it to say, The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight is a rip-roaring delight, a movie that lets itself have nothing but fun across its 81 minutes. While it’s never a safe thing to presume, Arrow is a film where you can feel the team behind it having so much fun making it (which no doubt is enhanced by the familial cast — Gus’ father, Reed Birney, also shows up in a minor role), and amongst a sea of same-y indies, Schaefer’s throwback style is totally fresh.
Published as part of New/Next Film Festival 2026 — Dispatch 1.
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