sci fi

MICKEY 17: lovable loser in space

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Photo caption: Robert Pattinson in MICKEY 17. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

In Bong Joon Ho’s futuristic comic fable Mickey 17, Robert Pattinson plays Mickey, a dim bulb looking to escape a nasty loan shark. Mickey’s desperation is so high, and his self esteem is so low, that he takes a horrific assignment on a space colonization expedition. Mickey’s new job title is Expendable – his body and brain are scanned so that he can be replicated and reprogrammed with his own memories if he is killed; that allows the expedition to use him as a guinea pig and a scout, who can test pilot conditions that might be lethal. Indeed, Mickey has been killed so often that his seventeenth version – Mickey 17 – has just been 3-D printed.

The expedition is led by a buffoonish narcissist and media hog (Mark Ruffalo). He is an election loser who seeks to regain his Big Fish status on a frozen planet. Headstrong and intellectually lazy, he hasn’t bothered to research the destination planet, figuring that he can bull ahead and overwhelm any obstacles with resources, aggression and technology. Does this profile remind you of anyone? He is amoral and utterly ruthless, as is his wife (Toni Collette) . She is kind of a demented Lady Macbeth, obsessed with concocting something she calls “sauce”.

As the colonization attempt faces more challenges and the leader becomes more awful and more unhinged, the expedition’s survival depends on poor Mickey and his closest two colleagues (one of which is really, really, really close). Comic situations and sci fi action ensues.

Although Mickey 17 is a comedy, I only heard the occasional chuckle from the audience. I found the ending to be predictable.

Director and writer Bong Joo Ho adapted the screenplay from the Edward Ashton novel Mickey 7. Bong is a critic of unfettered capitalism, and, Mickey 17, like Snowpiercer, Okja and his Oscar-winner Parasite, takes on the issues of class and corporate greed.

Part of the problem is that Bong asked Ruffalo (with gleaming teeth and a rich guy haircut) and Collette to deliver over-the-top performances, and they obliged. The social satire would have packed more of a punch with more realistic characters, as in Parasite.

This may be, however, a career-topping performance by Robert Pattinson, who nails Mickey’s goofy resignation. His narration, in Mickey’s voice, is a hoot.

Besides Pattinson, the standout is British actress Naomi Ackie, who plays what is essentially the female lead. She’s wonderfully charismatic, and badass,

Bong Joo Ho makes movies so original that it’s been said that he is his own genre. His Memories of Murder is, for my money, the very best serial killer movie. Mickey 17 is always entertaining, but, on th whole, one of Bong’s lesser efforts.

THE SUBSTANCE: the thinking woman’s Faust, if you can take the body horror

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Photo caption: Demi Moore in THE SUBSTANCE. Courtesy of MUBI.

Wow, this movie sizzles with originality and it’s a showcase for an emerging female filmmaker, but I’m not sure if you’ll want to watch it. In The Substance, writer-director Coralie Fargeat comments on all the perversity around the unrealistic ideals of female beauty by reimagining the classic Faustian bargain – what would you give up to restore physical youthfulness? Fargeat has made a sharply funny movie that melds the science fiction and horror genres. It’s absolutely brilliant, but some viewers may not be able to get past the body horror.

Elisabeth (Demi Moore) was a big movie star thirty years ago, and is now starring in a network fitness show (think Jane Fonda’s Workout franchise). Elisabeth is happy with her life until the male suits at the TV network tell that she’s passed her Sell By date and prepare to dump her for a younger, hotter starlet. The shock jars Elisabeth into a desperate spiral of body-loathing. Of course, this is absurd because I would describe Demi Moore as the world’s most beautiful 47-year-old woman, except she’s really 62.

Elisabeth finds a mysterious underground pharmaceutical (called The Substance) that will miraculously take 30 years off her appearance. There is a at least one catch. She has to inject a substance, which triggers the formation of a clone in a separate, younger body – but only for a week; then she needs to recover by re-inhabiting the older body. Off and on she goes, alternating weeks and the older and younger versions. Eventually, she learns about an even more significant side effect.

The clone is Sue (Margaret Qualley), who immediately is hired to replace Elisabeth on the show and vaults to stardom herself. With her celebrity, riches and stunning beauty, Sue’s life is pretty damn great – until each week is over. We soon realize that this is not going to end well for either Elisabeth or Sue.

There is a lot of body horror in The Substance, beginning with an icky “clone birth” scene and the weekly transitions between Elisabeth and Sue. The Substance ends with an over-the-top, splattering finale that makes Carrie look like a finger prick. It’s not going to work for most of my readers whom I know personally. I’m not a big horror fan and especially don’t care for body horror, but I’m glad I hung with it.

Margaret Qualley in THE SUBSTANCE. Courtesy of MUBI.

The Substance is the second feature for French writer-director Coralie Fargeat. Her first film Revenge (which I haven’t yet seen) won accolades as a feminist take on the rape revenge genre. To keep her right of final cut, Fargeat spurned Hollywood financing and made The Substance on spec. It is now the highest grossing film for MUBI, which bought the distribution rights. She knows what to do with the actors, the camera and the soundtrack, and is unafraid of coloring outside the lines. Wow, Fargeat is impressive.

The first three scenes are enrapturing. The first is an overhead shot of a broken egg, which is injected with a syringe and then clones a second yolk. The second scene is another overhead shot, this one of Elisabeth’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which traces the arc of her career. The third is of Elisabeth leaving the set of her show, as she absorbs the accolades of her stardom, the unwelcome birthday wishes and some rude hints to her aging out of being a sex symbol. Really smart storytelling.

Predictably, given my personal bias, I thought that the running time 2 hours, 20 minutes was too long, but it’s not like the movie dragged.

The male characters in The Substance are not very smart nor even minimally evolved; they are so broadly played that it’s even fun for men in the audience.

This is career-topping performance for Demi Moore, who , besides being uniquely physically perfect for the role, brings out all of Elisabeth’s yearnings and vulnerabilities – and her fraught ambivalence for continuing with The Substance. Moore is also a good sport about working under some some very extreme prosthetics.

Margaret Qualley always brings energy and magnetism to her performances, and she’s superb here as s Sue who, like Elisabeth, wants it all and wants it too much.

Dennis Quaid takes boorishness to new lows as a shamelessly sexist network boss. Quaid must have had lots of fun in this role, and he’s hilarious.

The Substance got a standing ovation at its premiere at Cannes, and won the People’s Choice Award at Toronto. The Substance is now streaming on Amazon and AppleTV, and it’s free on MUBI.

MEGALOPOLIS: pretentious, cartoonish, incoherent

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Photo caption: Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in MEGALOPOLIS. Courtesy of Lionsgate.

The epic Megalopolis is Francis Ford Coppola’s labor of love, a project he had been imagining since the 1970s. I’m glad he finally got to make the movie he wanted to make. Sadly, it’s not good.

Megalopolis is set later in this century in a New York City fictionalized as New Rome. Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a visionary urban designer, seeks to replace midtown Manhattan with his creation, a utopian built environment. From his aerie atop the Chrysler Building, Cesar is as unaccountable Robert Moses in The Power Broker. Cesar must overcome the resistance of the vision-impervious mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the psychotically venal aristocrat Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) and Cesar’s own ruthlessly avaricious mistress Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza). Mayor Cicero’s Wild Child daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) sets out to punish Cesar for Cesar’s disrespect to her father, but she becomes fascinated by him.

Obviously, no one can imagine razing and rebuilding 100 contiguous square blocks of Manhattan without some hubris, and Cesar has plenty. Of course, he has invented a miracle building material, won a Nobel Prize and has the super power of stopping time. But his hubris makes him underestimate his enemies at his peril. Soon, Cesar and New Rome are plunged into a convulsion of betrayal and treachery. Will Cesar and his vision survive?

The visuals are astounding. New Rome is so dystopian that we yearn for the Times Square of Joe Buck, Ratso Rizzo and Travis Bickle. Ben Hur-like gladiator battles emerge, and a circus looks like Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge. There’s no shortage of eye candy.

Unfortunately, there are also no shortage of movie-killing flaws. The first is the revolting pretentiousness. Each chapter is introduced with a self-important title, carved into stone, no less. Great Thinkers, from Marcus Aurelius to Ralph Waldo Emerson, are quoted, and, just in case that isn’t elevated enough, Latin is occasionally uttered. Every time poor Lawrence Fishburne speaks in voice-over, he’s proclaiming something ridiculously heavy-handed without any irony. All of these Great Thoughts are about as deep as the inside of a Hallmark greeting card.

The second major flaw is that Megalopolis is a message movie with a message that is naive and simplistic. Coppola seems to have missed the core lesson in The Power Broker, which is that the tradeoff for letting an unaccountable visionary build great things in a city, is that the result may be unjust, and that regular people are stripped of any ability to control their own lives. Everybody likes freedom, which requires the messiness and inefficiency of democracy. Coppola wants us to root for Cesar because he is vaguely high-minded, but letting Cesar have his way on everything is pretty disrespectful of Cesar’s fellow citizens.

Third, with one exception, the characters are cartoonish, like they’ve been pulled from a Batman movie. As a result, we don’t care about them. For example, there’s never been an actress better equipped to play a dangerous, sexy conniver than Aubrey Plaza; but here, Plaza only gets to act like a comic strip version of a dangerous, sexy conniver. Clodio is a silly cross between a Bond villain and Dr. Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (and Shia LaBeouf ‘s eye makeup sometimes makes him resemble TV character actor Anthony Zerbe). Cesar himself toggles between smug and tortured with little texture.

Finally, the story is often incomprehensible.

This all makes for a wretched movie-viewing experience. 

There are a few bright spots. Nathalie Emmanuel seems to be acting in a different movie than the rest of the cast, and imbues her Julia with life force, charisma and genuine feelings. Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck themselves are back in very small parts. Dustin Hoffman sparkles as a big city fixer. Jon Voight plays a doddering financier with the dulled eyes and speaking mannerism of Donald Trump – very funny. And what about the name of Aubrey Plaza’s character – Wow Platinum? What would her stripper name be?

It pains me to pan a Coppola movie. Casablanca remains my favorite all-time movie, but The Godfather Part II is probably my #2. Godfather II, along with The Godfather, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now! are films that have impacted me deeply. That being said, as fond of Coppola as I am, and even reverential, I haven’t been enraptured by his post-1979 body of work.

In the first 20 minutes of Megalopolis, I resolved that I didn’t care about any aspect of the film and was going to walk out, but somehow stayed for the entire two hours, eighteen minutes, You don’t need to.  

THE INVISIBLES: choosing to live again

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Tim Blake Nelson and Gretchen Mol in THE INVISIBLES. Courtesy of Cinequest.

In the engrossing dramatic parable The Invisibles, Charlie (Tim Blake Nelson) has become so disengaged from his job and his marriage that he becomes invisible – at first metaphorically and then literally – to those around him. Charlie is finding this disturbing enough, but then he happens on an entire community of invisible people like him in a parallel dimension. Can they return to the world of the visible? And do they want to?

The invisibles hang out together in a decrepit bowling alley, led by Carl the affable bartender (Bruce Greenwood). Charlie learns that the invisibles have each experienced a loss, a disappointment or a betrayal so devastating that they have each given up on life in some way. But there’s no more emotional pain in the invisible world, and the bowling alley is a hub of merrymaking.

Charlie and his wife Hannah (Gretchen Mol) have suffered a grievous loss; Hannah has been working hard to recover, but the grief has paralyzed Charlie into a toxic mire of denial, avoidance and apathy.

As Charlie finds himself torn between his love for his wife and the comfort of the invisible world, The Invisibles explores the how people react to the pain of loss and the painful process of getting beyond it. The ingenious metaphor of the parallel universes is the creation of writer-director Andrew Currie. He wrote and directed Fido, one of my Zombie Movies for People Who Don’t Like Zombie Movies.

Tim Blake Nelson is an acting treasure, and he’s at the top of his game here. Mol and Greenwood are excellent, too, as is Nathan Alexis as one of the invisibles.

Cinequest hosted the world premiere of The Invisibles today and will present a second screening tomorrow, March 11. The Invisibles is highlighted as one of two Must See films in my Best of Cinequest.

Tim Blake Nelson and Gretchen Mol in THE INVISIBLES. Courtesy of Cinequest.

DADDY: four guys, four chances to fail

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A scene from DADDY. Courtesy of Cinequest.

The dark sci fi comedy Daddy: is set in a future where only a limited number of men are approved by the government to father children. Four guys apply for the privilege and are isolated in a mountain lodge to wait for the expert evaluator, who doesn’t immediately show up. As they try to figure out what’s going on and what they should do, they succeed only in demonstrating how unfit they would be as parents – until things get all Lord of the Rings. It’s a very funny skewering of both male overconfidence and male angst.

Finally, the guys get an unexpected visitor, who may or may not be the evaluator that they expect. What’s impressive about this episode is how each man’s instinctual reaction, different from each other’s, can be so profoundly wrongheaded.

The mountain lodge is equipped with an artificial baby model (a doll). Co-writers Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman refrain from overusing this prop in slapstick. It’s far funnier to glimpse the doll as it seems to silently rebuke the foolhardiness around it.

Daddy is the second feature and first feature, respectively, for for co-directors/co-writers Kelley and Sherman, who also play two of the guys. Cinequest’s online festival Cinejoy hosts the world premiere of Daddy.

NOPE: an exceptionally intelligent popcorn movie

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Daniel Kaluuya in NOPE. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Jordan Peele’s Nope is an exceptionally intelligent popcorn movie. I’m not a big horror/sci fi guy, and I loved it.

Siblings OJ and Emerald own their dad’s legacy ranch in a desolate SoCal valley (Nope was shot near Santa Clarita). Surreal, unexplained events take place, and they wonder if the happenings are supernatural or extraterrestrial (as in space aliens)?

At first, there are strange noises. Then sinister things happen with ordinary objects – a house key, a Jefferson head nickel and, eventually, a blue tarp. Finally, OJ connects the dots about a cloud in the sky and…we’re off on a thrill ride.

This is not an agricultural ranch – it houses horses that are trained for production of movies and video commercials. OJ is continuing his dad’s role as a professional movie horse trainer and wrangler.

OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) is a man of few words – very few words. He’s all business, and prefers horses to people. Uncomfortable with the Hollywood schmooze and hustle, he wonders why being a horse whisperer doesn’t seem to be enough to keep the business alive.

OTOH, his sister Emerald (a very funny Keke Palmer) is all about self-promotion, and sees her future success coming from showbiz or the internet, not from isolated, dusty horse corrals. She is bubbly, self-absorbed and has no boundaries.

On the other side of the valley, there’s another ranch, owned by a former child television star Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yuen), who runs a hokey, retro Old West theme park. (The cheesy, family theme park reminded me of San Jose’s Frontier Village in my youth.) In Jupe ‘s back story, there’s an incident from his childhood TV work that fits with one of Nope’s themes – the dangers of messing with natural phenomena.

Why would space aliens come to our planet – to explore, conquer, inhabit our bodies, study us or destroy us”? From 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still and 1953’s War of the Worlds, movies have posed the question, should we fight off the aliens or try to make friends? In a brilliantly pointed observation of our culture in 2022, Jordan Peele knows that many would ask – how can we monetize this?

Brandon Perea, Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer in NOPE. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

OJ and Emerald need high tech assistance, and they happen upon a Gen X geek working in a particularly reviled electronics store. Angel (a perfect Brandon Perea) greets them with a despairingly weary Thanks for shopping at Fry’s and invites himself along on their quest.

Nope begins with a WOW segment and ends with a Western-movie-meets-sci-fi horseback escape. Along the way, it explores the transformation of our economy and culture.

Daniel Kaluuya is a charismatic enough presence that he can, like Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood, carry a feature film without saying much. Keke Palmer and Brandon Perea are very funny in essential roles. Yuen’s performance may be the most nuanced, with an insincere Hollywood slickness masking his feelings about a childhood trauma and a failing business. Michael Wincott is excellent as an old school cinematographer whose gravelly voice makes Sam Elliott sound like a soprano.

The title is from a hilariously appropriate mutterance of OJ’s. The obvious title Don’t Look Up was employed by Adam McKay just last year.

Here’s a hopeful thought. Will Jordan Peele bring young moviegoers to theaters for horror thrills and teach them to expect SMART movies?

Nope is now widely available to stream (and should be watched on the biggest screen available to you). It’s one of the Best Movies of 2022 – So Far.

LINOLEUM: highly original and sweet

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Jim Gaffigan and Rhea Seehorn in LINOLEUM. Courtesy of Blue Fox Entertainment.

Colin West’s Linoleum, a gentle story of a lovable loser with a nose-diving kid’s science TV show, is superficially about the guy’s eccentric attempt to build a real rocket in his garage; but it’s really three love stories – or are they one love story? Although West peppers some clues throughout, it’s not until the final act that the audience connects the dots about what is going on. Linoleum is hard to review – or even describe – without spoilers, but let’s just say that it is a highly original and sweet film.

Our TV host Cameron (Jim Gaffigan) is an astronomer who seems overqualified for his charmingly corny children’s show. He takes the science seriously, but not himself. Cameron is the kind of affable guy who always gets run over by the more self-interested among us.

Cameron is married to Erin (Rhea Seehorn) a smarty pants aeronautical engineer who is direcying programs at a provicial air and space museum. Like Cameron, she started out as a whiz kid and is wondering. Unlike Cameron, who is placidly content, she is wondering how she got stuck in the bush leagues. Erin’s dissatisfaction with her career, and with Cameron’s lack of ambition, is threatening their marriage.

The teenage girl in the story meets the new boy in high school, and they tentatively stumble into a guileless friendship. This thread in Linoleum is especially charming.

The comedian Jim Gaffigan has shown that he’s also a fine actor (Light from Light), and Rhea Seehorn (Better Call Saul, Veep) is one of our finest TV actors. Both are very good in Linoleum.

The first two acts of Linoleum are fairly easy-to-follow, with a couple small mysteries that could be imagined or hallucinated. The third act, which I will not spoil, becomes more confusing until West connects the threads of the story and we understand what we’ve been watching ll along. Viewers who need linear stories may be frustrated, but the payoff is splendid.

I saw Linoleum at the opening night of Cinequest, with Gaffigan and West in attendance.

UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS: offbeat, then surreal, finally redemptive

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Photo caption: Matthew August Jeffers in UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS. Courtesy of Unidentified Objects Film, LLC.

The Odd-Couple-On-A-Roadtrip dramedy Unidentified Objects takes us on a singular journey – from the offbeat through the surreal to the redemptive.

The self-isolation of anti-social gay dwarf Peter (Matthew August Jeffers) is disrupted when his neighbor, the chirpy sex worker Winona (Sarah Hay) insists that he provide his car for her drive from New York to Canada. She seeks to keep an appointment there with her space alien abductors. Wanting nothing to do with Winona or any aliens, Peter is nonetheless driven by financial necessity to agree.

In every social situation, Peter is quick to find (or manufacture) a grievance and explode in a torrent of invective; the rest of the time Peter seethes, leaking unpleasantness. It turns out that he is grieving the loss of a close friend – and with an overlay of guilt.

The trip is eventful. The two encounter lesbian cosplayers (one proud to cosplay full time – is that a thing?). Peter has dreams of a traffic stop by an extraterrestrial highway patrolman and of unexpected kindness in Canadian roadhouse.

Matthew August Jeffers (Peter Hobbes) and Sarah Hay (Winona Jordan) in UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS. Courtesy of Unidentified Objects Film, LLC.

Yet the tone of Unidentified Objects is neither is not zany nor madcap. In his first feature, director and co-writer Juan Felipe Zuleta has created a character-driven story – no matter the odd occurrences, the roots of Peter’s unrest are simmering just beneath the surface. The story is about what Winona finds at the end of her trip, and, more profoundly, what Peter finds at the terminus of his.

Zuleta’s dream sequences are vivid and realistic – and all the more surreal because they seem real (until they don’t).

Through most of the film, Peter’s bitterness becomes grating, but, for those who hang in there, the payoff is worth it.

The US premiere of Unidentified Objects is at Frameline – in person on June 19 and streaming after June 24.

Matthew August Jeffers in UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS. Courtesy
of Unidentified Objects Film, LLC.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE: often indecipherable and mostly dazzling

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Photo caption: Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh and James Hong in EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. Courtesy of A24.

The mind-bender Everything Everywhere All At Once is often indecipherable and mostly dazzling. It’s as if a martial arts version of It’s a Wonderful Life were written by Terry Gilliam on LSD and Red Bull

Michelle Yeoh shines as Evelyn, the burned-out owner of the coin laundromat that she lives above. Evelyn is simultaneously tying to run the business, survive a crippling IRS audit, organize a birthday party for her cranky father and avoid facing her daughter Joy’s (Stephanie Hsu) having a girlfriend. Stressed out to the max, Evelyn is so emotionally neglectful of her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) that she doesn’t grok that he’s trying to divorce her (for emotional neglect).

Suddenly, Evelyn is plunged into a multiverse where a master villain named Jobu Topaki is wreaking carnage and sometimes inhabiting Joy’s body. And, just as suddenly, we are plunged into a mile-a-minute adventure like being inside a pinball machine. Every so often, Waymond is possessed by a multiverse good guy and blurts out a stream of exposition, but it’s best not to try to follow it.

An “everything bagel” appears – both literally and metaphorically. There’s a heartfelt message embedded that is much simpler than all the sci fi hoopla.

It takes a movie star like Yeoh (the martial arts star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Bond Girl in Tomorrow Never Dies, and the steely mom in Crazy Rich Asians).tio hold the center of this wacky extravaganza.

Jamie Lee Curtis in EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. Courtesy of A24.

The rest of the cast is excellent, too. Ke Huy Quan, who, as a child, played Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom captures Waymond’s gentle cluelessness and domestic frustration. I especially loved 93-year-old James Hong (recognizable from his 450 screen credits) as Evelyn’s dad. The funniest performance is by a hilariously glammed-down Jamie Lee Curtis as the IRS agent.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is co-written and co-directed by the Daniels – Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The pair is best known for getting $3 million to make the utterly transgressive Swiss Army Man, starring Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) as a flatulent corpse.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a succession of zany action and eye candy with an avalanche of googly eyes at the climax. The best bits are:

  • a brilliant martial arts set piece with a fannypack as a weapon.
  • a fantasy of what Evelyn’s life would be if she hadn’t married Waymond, which turns out to be the real movie star life of Michelle Yeoh.
  • the moment in evolutionary history when hot dog fingers overcame real human fingers in natural selection.
  • a live action homage to the movie Ratatouille with a CGI racoon.
Stephanie Hsu in EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. Courtesy of A24.

One more note: the costume design (Shirley Kurata) and makeup (Michelle Chung) for Joy when she’s possessed by the villain is inspired.

I’ve rarely seen so much imagination thrown up on the screen, mostly for the better. Everything Everywhere All At Once is kinda draining to watch and often frustrating, but its best moments are very, very good.

STRAWBERRY MANSION: a trippy and sweet fable

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A scene from Kentucker Audley’s and Albert Birney’s film STRAWBERRY MANSION. Courtesy of SFFILM

To celebrate the 2022 SFFILM, underway, now, here’s a gem from last year’s SFFILM. The very trippy and ultimately sweet fable Strawberry Mansion is set in a future where people’s dreams are taxed. Preble (Kentucker Audley), a workaday tax auditor, is assigned to audit the dreams of an elderly artist, Bella (Penny Fuller). Preble is soon plunged into an Alice in Wonderland experience with her dreams, and his dreams, and a romance to boot.

Preble puts on a gizmo to watch the dreams pf others (and comes across an even cooler gizmo that filters dreams). He even encounters Bella’s younger self (Grace Glowicki).

Strawberry Mansion is also a sharp and funny critique of insidious commercialism. A fictional brand of fried chicken keeps showing up in the story. Hilariously, Preble becomes entangled in an endless loop of upselling at a fast food drive-thru. And Preble is constantly prodded to consume by his own diabolical dream buddy (Linas Phillips). A sinister marketing plot is revealed.

A scene from Kentucker Audley’s and Albert Birney’s film STRAWBERRY MANSION. Courtesy of SFFILM

Kentucker Audley is very good as Preble, who starts out the movie mildly annoyed and evolves into various degrees of bewilderment. Audley is one of those actors who keeps showing up in something interesting (and offbeat) like Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow and Sun Don’t Shine, or in smaller parts in especially fine films like Her Smell and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.

As Bella, Penny Fuller radiates a contentment that ranges from ditzy to sage. Reed Birney is especially good as Bella’s sinister son.

Audley co-wrote and co-directed Strawberry Mansion with Albert Birney. They make the most of the surreal settings within dreams, and use different color palettes for each dream; the palette for Preble’s real-life bachelor apartment is pretty surreal, too.

I screened Strawberry Mansion for the 2021 SFFILM. It’s now available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube and can be purchased on Blu-ray after May 17.