With all due credit to Lewis Carroll, the concept of the “rabbit hole” has become so prevalent that it crops up in virtually every person’s daily life. This is, of course, thanks in major part to the internet, an interactive way station that’s practically designed to foster and develop rabbit holes of all kinds, from the benign breadcrumbing of information to leading the way down malicious paths of indoctrination and radicalization. Conspiracy theories used to be the near-exclusive province of those with mental illness issues who let their lives fall by the wayside as they devoted all their time to the pursuit of what they believed to be the truth. Now, however, anyone from a high-level CEO to a suburban homemaker can find themselves obsessing over unexplained minutiae with just a few clicks or smartphone taps. The number of people falling down these rabbit holes has likely doubled over the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to things like lockdowns and working from home keeping people more isolated and stationary. As current leaders and innovators of trippy indie genre movies, filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead acknowledge the current landscape of America as suffused with supposed conspiracies with their latest work, SOMETHING IN THE DIRT. The film reflects both the locked down, increasingly uncertain and paranoid mood of the country while also being a paean to DIY independent filmmaking, resulting in a movie that’s the duo’s most energetic and imaginative to date.
Like most works of immense complexity, the set-up for SOMETHING IN THE DIRT is deceptively simple. Two Los Angeles lunkheads, Levi Danube (Benson) and John Daniels (Moorhead)—a bartender and a photographer, respectively—meet in the courtyard of the apartment building where John has lived for some time and Levi has just moved in. Levi remarks on how he’s noticed some strange things in his new and still somewhat unfurnished apartment, and it isn’t long before the duo jointly witness a mysterious crystal (which they’d recently used as an ashtray) float into the air in conjunction with some unexplainable lights emanating from various points. Rather than call in any authorities, the two men do what all good enterprising white male pals do: decide to start a podcast. Their plans quickly shift to instead filming a documentary about the phenomenon, and their attempts to capture the floating crystal on video lead them to more clues and more research about the history of their apartment building and, eventually, Los Angeles itself. As the two men fall further and further down the rabbit hole they’ve plunged into, they discover that not only may they be on the trail of the mysteries of the universe and what may lay beyond it, but that neither man entirely knows the other’s past, with one or both of them not telling each other the whole truth. That complication is further compounded by the revelation that we—the actual audience—are not watching the “real” events unfold, but rather a recreation made by Levi and John.
If that all sounds like a lot, well—it is, but it’s clear right from the outset of SOMETHING IN THE DIRT that you’re in steady and fair hands with Benson and Moorhead. To be fair, the duo’s movies are all challenging to a point: with the possible exceptions of 2014’s SPRING and 2019’s SYNCHRONIC, their work isn’t easy to reduce to a catch-all logline or prefab genre structure. Even those two exceptions contain a myriad of unusual and unique elements to catch an audience off guard, and every Benson/Moorhead joint acts in a similar way to the non-superhero films of Christopher Nolan, where the movie teaches you how to watch it as you’re watching it. Naturally, it’s easy to be a little emotionally distanced from their films upon a first watch, and SOMETHING IN THE DIRT asks a lot of the viewer in terms of building various covenants and then bending or, more often, breaking them. Yet this isn’t a movie that’s looking to play a “gotcha!” game with its audience—instead, the cumulative effect of confusion and apprehension lends the film a more enticing and playful tone. In other words, it’s easy to get lost within the movie’s dense rabbit hole, but Benson and Moorhead make it clear that being lost is the entire point and is much more fun than frustrating.
Helping enormously in that regard are the duo’s performances as Levi and John, which do the heavy lifting in making the movie a vibrant and comedic experience above all else. While their characters are hardly caricatures, there is a distinct vibe of BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989) here, with two affable not-quite-dimwits getting in way over their heads with everything from quantum physics to historical secret societies to potentially extraterrestrial flora. Benson has the uncanny ability as a writer to seem incredibly educated on any given arcane or complex topic, making Levi and John sound like they know what they’re talking about at least half the time. As the characters bounce from theory to theory and bumble along by declaring something totally safe one moment and the next worried that they might have just endangered their lives, Benson and Moorhead make it clear that it’s the journey and not the destination that’s important here. Thus, walking away from the film either with multiple complex theories or not a damn clue about what happened are both totally valid and immaterial. After all, the meta context of the movie is essentially about discrediting it in totality, which leaves only the experience of it as the most concrete thing.
That’s not to say SOMETHING IN THE DIRT is substance-less, however, as its dizzying spiral narrative allows for a ton of thematic and narrative interpretations. For those of us enjoying the development of Benson and Moorhead as auteurs, it once again proves their adeptness at bringing together close-knit collaborators such as producer David Lawson Jr., production designer/second unit director Ariel Vida and composer Jimmy LaValle to make a film that feels organic and analog, lending it a handmade vibe despite numerous digital technologies being used. It also continues their trend of making movies that deal with themes of male friendship and the various ways bonds between men can be unspoken, strengthened and strained—that theme itself, of course, being its own meta twist on the real-life Benson and Moorhead, two male friends who are this year celebrating a decade of being close collaborators. To anyone familiar with their work reading this review, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that Benson and Moorhead actually live in the apartments on display in SOMETHING IN THE DIRT, a fact which speaks to both the fourth-wall breaking playfulness of the movie as well as its origins as a reflection of being stuck in lockdown. Unlike the dangerous and more upsetting paths to get lost in online and elsewhere, the films of Benson and Moorhead are a continually enjoyable rabbit hole to fall into.
Tags: Aaron Moorhead, Ariel Vida, David Lawson Jr, Jimmy LaValle, Justin Benson, Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival 2022
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