I really dug Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s The Endless. And while I liked Synchronic fine enough, their screen presence as actors – not just as the co-directors, writer and cinematographer of their projects – is an underrated element. Something In The Dirt (2022) was something Moorhead and Benson made during the pandemic, basically filming in their apartments and shooting with a skeleton crew, mainly themselves. Watching it a couple of years after its release, the film doesn’t feel beholden to the time like a lot of other pandemic-era productions, without any sign of Covid protocols or Covid related anxiety in the film itself.
Two L.A. losers meet in the same apartment block they occupy. Benson plays the bartender who acts like he’s chill, and Moorhead is the photographer who acts like he’s a normal stiff. When they discover a strange phenomenon in Benson’s apartment, they decide to make a documentary, hoping to sell big to Netflix. Tumbling down the rabbit-hole together, feeding each other theories they heard on a podcast or read somewhere online, the movie matches the sense of information overload with cutaways to photographs, clips, interviews, even home movies. Outside locations are used to give the movie an expansive feeling, rather than feeling tied to the apartment location, and it also works as a “looking from the gutter to the stars” portrait of Los Angeles.
If the movie were a bit shorter and tighter, it would have more impact, but at the same time, the drag in the latter half feels true to the sense of exhaustion that follows the initial exhilaration of conspiratorial investigation. Benson and Moorhead’s performances were great, and I really enjoyed how the movie captures uneasiness between the two characters, shifting distrust over who exactly you’re in the rabbit-hole with. That, and even faced with existential terror from a cosmic phenomenon you can’t explain, it still hurts when someone doesn’t like the title you came up with.
Streamed on Brollie. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 