Well, here’s a welcome change: A film title that actually works. Yeah, it lands squarely in Alexander And The TL;DR territory, but for a movie all about cult mentality, it sure sounds like the name of a self-help book that would garner a small but creepily devoted fanbase. And yes, we’re doing a SpectreVision double feature today (well, technically, this is from Company X, but same producers, so let’s not split hairs here), and despite this being about such a dark topic, this isn’t a horror movie. Not in the conventional sense, at least; this is a lot closer to The Greasy Strangler in tone, and much like that feature, it’s difficult to put into word how truly batshit insane this entire thing is.
This redefines ‘quirky’. This is at such a high level of ‘golly gee, look how funny and weird we’re being’ right from the start, there would be no shame if someone were immediately turned off by it. This is what American indie comedies look like to people who hate American indie comedies. And yet, this might be one of the single best examples of unabashed quirkiness on film I’ve ever covered, possibly ever seen. While it starts at a rather loud volume as is, it somehow manages to find new heights of raw nervous energy to tap into the further it goes into its run time, so it doesn’t make the mistake of starting on full blast and then petering out.
But that’s almost a minor point in comparison to this: I am frankly astonished that footage even exists of these actors, saying these lines, that doesn’t consist solely of them corpsing like no one had ever corpsed before. Sam Huntington in particular deserves an Oscar for delivering that monologue with a straight face, and until you see this for yourself, you’ll have no idea how much I’m not kidding about that.
Let’s do a quick break-down of the cast on offer here: We have Huntington and Kate Micucci as the main couple who move into a new apartment, we have Taika Waititi as the cult leader who killed himself in their bathtub, we have an array of cameos from Maria Bamford to Brian Posehn to the Greasy Strangler himself Michael St. Michaels as members of his cult who all want to die the same way their leader did, and we have Dan Harmon as the requisite detective and struggling screenwriter who investigates every one of these deaths not to find out how it happened, but just because he has to. Any two of these actors on their own would’ve been enough, but all of them together is an alt-comedy wet dream.
Now, I can already see a problem developing with how I’m phrasing the appeal of this film. Mass suicide… ha ha ha. Doesn’t exactly go together, does it? Well, again, the tone is set right from the off with Waititi explaining that “Death is like eating peppermint ice cream on your terms”, leading the way for people in increasingly deranged levels of adherence to his every word. It also helps that, despite the singular location for all the deaths, the film never ends up running out of ideas for Looney Tunes ways for these people to leave this plane of existence.
It also helps that, underneath all this incredibly dark humour surrounding cult mentality, the script carries a lot of understanding of what comprises that mentality and, more importantly, what makes it grow in the minds of others. It’s basically the reason why I am immediately sceptical of just about any ‘self-help gurus’ on this side of the screen, as their methodologies aren’t that different from Waititi’s Storsh. Get the attention of emotionally insecure people, give them advice that they could likely get anywhere (but make it important that it’s coming from you specifically), allow them to grow an attachment to you because the advice you’re giving makes sense and establish a feeling of trust, nurture that trust so that they will hang on your every word (not just the stuff they already agree with), get them to bring in more people so that they will do the same, and boom! You got yourself a cult.
That on its own is accurate enough, but then it gets into
the effect of media and marketing, and it points the finger at the audience’s
own fascination with these groups and leaders. It gets into how much attention cults get after a suicide pact is enacted (Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown,
etc.), and portrays cult programming as something that invades the mind and subtly twists it. And the way it progresses,
from simple curiosity to begrudging agreement to whole-hearted agreement to
‘gaze into my glowing tub of death!’, is hilarious but also kinda terrifying, and
can happen as the result of any amount of blunt force bullshit in the social
media age, not just literal cult shit. The running joke of the cultists in this
reciting from court transcripts of acquittal cases involving Storsh
emphasises how insidious this all is.
So, yeah, it’s a lot heavier than its perpetual frothiness would ever let on, and to be perfectly honest, it’s part of the reason why this is so bloody hilarious. The electrified atmosphere of cringe primes the audience for wackiness, while the subject matter and the level of understanding thereof creates scenario after scenario that are so overblown, yet so harrowing when you really think about them, that you need to laugh in order to break the tension. It’s cringe comedy as it was designed to be, as a give-no-fucks disembowelment of social norms, and with how much those wacky death-cult leaders have entered the popular consciousness… this is normal. And while we may laugh at how ridiculous it all is, that doesn’t change the fact that this should never be considered normal.
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