Alternating between icky-squishy horror, fish-out-of-water comedy, and doppelgänger abstraction, director Kourtney Roy’s Kryptic certainly lives up to its title. If the whole thing ultimately feels a bit like a shaggy dog story, it’s so charming on a scene-by-scene basis that you might not care that it doesn’t add up to much. The film opens with Kay Hall (Chloe Pirrie) embarking on a guided tour through dense forests. Ostensibly geared toward cryptozoology enthusiasts, one gets the impression that Kay is lonely and socially awkward, and that this excursion might be an attempt to make friends. But she hangs back from the group, eats lunch alone, and otherwise seems too timid to reach out to any of the other women in the group. But she’s also there with an ulterior motive; Kay is interested in the disappearance of famed Cryptid researcher Barb Valentine. It seems Valentine vanished in this same wooded area while hunting for a Sooka, a creature that is said to be able to manipulate time and space around anyone who encounters it. Naturally, Kay almost immediately runs into it, setting off a series of increasingly odd misadventures as Jay seeks to put her life back in order.
Kay wakes up back at home with no memory of how she got there, or even who exactly she is. She wanders around her house in a daze, as if seeing for the first time. When someone calls and asks her to pick up an extra shift at work, she doesn’t know what her job is (Pirrie’s delivery of “I’m a fucking veterinarian”’ is fantastic comedic acting). Eventually, she spots a picture of Barb Valentine and realizes that they look exactly alike (or are simply the same person; it’s unclear which, or if it even matters). Soon, Kay returns to the forest to retrace her steps and figure out what happened to her/Barb. Interspersed throughout this first act are brief glimpses, presumably flashbacks, of Kay cavorting with a fleshy, sticky mass in an orgiastic delirium.
Working with writer Paul Bromley and cinematographer David Bird, Roy’s oddball film charts something of a community of eccentrics who have sprung up in and around the world of these fantastical critters. Kay’s journey retracing the steps of alter-ego Barb takes her to a deserted roadside motel, a hole-in-the-wall bar, and eventually a trailer park. Each stop leads to a strange encounter, be it with the extremely gregarious, slightly of -motel manager or an aggressively horny bartender. There’s an undercurrent of freeing oneself from repression shot through the narrative — strange sequences of Kay fucking various people feature gloopy fluids, tendrils, and gaping vaginal imagery, as if Georgia O’Keeffe were collaborating with Giger.
Kay eventually encounters Barb’s husband Morgan (Jeff Gladstone), and things shift gears into a sort of feminist parable about overcoming a controlling partner. Critics have already jumped to compare Kryotic to David Lynch or Under the Skin, the sort of grasping assertion that obfuscates more than it illuminates. Kryptic is not as confidently stylized as any of those particular works, and Roy can’t quite find a formal equivalent for the narrative’s various mysteries. In other words, even as the story veers off into various abstractions, visually it remains pretty pro forma. Brief glimpses of the Sooka and Kay’s sexual encounters aside, the camera isn’t doing anything particularly interesting (although the British Columbia forests are quite lovely). Still, if there’s ultimately a frustrating disconnect between form and content that hampers the overall experience, Pirrie’s fine performance and a welcome streak of deadpan comedy mark Kryptic as a worthwhile curiosity at worst.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 2.
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