The so-called “Midnights” section at any given film festival offers audiences a slate of films that aim to “shake things up”, or to stray from mainstream programming. Something like Celine Song’s Past Lives doesn’t quite strike that chord, but movies like Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature most certainly fit the bill. At the Tribeca Festival, the films and the names involved in their making are on the smaller side, but the program is nonetheless stacked; frankly, its Midnight entrants are all the more intriguing for the festival’s overall makeup.
Take Mars, for example, the latest raunchfest from the comedy troupe, “The Whitest Kids U’ Know”. The animated comedy follows a ragtag group of civilians that has been randomly selected by a billionaire named Elron Branson to take a trip to the red planet for shits and giggles. The film’s main character, Kyle, is something of a stick-in-the-mud dentist who is bored with his life, wishes to be rid of his maniacal fiancé, and needs an easy way out. This fantastical sweepstakes couldn’t have come at a better time, and his selection to join the crew sets off a slew of inane and insane gags that essentially turn a lesser Adult Swim skit into an 80-minute feature.
Originally conceived as a live-action film by the group’s co-founders Zach Cregger (the writer-director of 2022’s Barbarian), Sam Brown, and the late Trevor Moore, Mars is silly, stupid, and wholly inappropriate. In other words, it’s quite literally what any Midnights section inclusion should set out to be. Elron Branson, the aforementioned billionaire behind this galactic extravaganza, has an obvious inspiration (or two) for his name, and is eager to tell anyone and everyone about how important it is that space travel has now been privatized in a manner that makes it out to be like a resort vacation. He gives every invention of his an acronymic name, including T.W.G.P.O.B.S.O.T.C.F, which somehow translates to “shower”, but actually stands for “There were good people on both sides of the Charlottesville fiasco.”
Evidently, Mars grows tired after a while. The “Family Guy”-style comedy and animation, the latter of which coming courtesy of the film’s director, Sevan Najarian, is far more fitting for a movie of this nature than whatever live-action plans the Whitest Kids had in mind, but its comedy is an exhausting blend of vulgarity and pop culture references that expired months ago, long before the spaceship’s 3-D food printer – known affectionately as the “Murdered Midwestern Homosexual Teenager” – could generate it for consumption. My audience was entertained for a time, but plenty of viewers beelined for the exits before the credits rolled. Such is life at a festival premiere.
A similar fate awaited Daniel Oriahi’s debut feature, The Weekend, a thriller about in-laws. (“My kind of movie!”, said no one ever.) This Get Out-inspired drama chronicles a tense, discomfiting journey of a young Nigerian couple back to the male’s home village where the family he chooses not to associate with – for reasons unknown – still resides. Luke (Bucci Franklin) is engaged to Nikya (Uzoamaka Aniunoh), a beautiful woman who, having been orphaned when she was a child, is desperate for a familial connection. Nikya thus urges Luke to reconcile with his parents and sister, and they return to his childhood home to discover that his family is upholding a facade to mask the darkness at its core.
If you’re imagining Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner by way of… well, any example would give The Weekend’s central-if-obvious twist away. (But let’s just assume that you’re on the right track.) It’s a debut that Oriahi proudly calls “completely, 100-percent Nigerian,” a fair statement about a film that, for all the posturing one of its characters does about being “a man of substance” over the course of its bloated, 117-minute run time, lacks meat despite all the bones it discards in its unfolding wake. Its primary conceit is telegraphed within an inch of its life, to the point where audiences might feel foolish for having believed it was too easy for the film to fall back on. Guess again; The Weekend’s intentions were painstakingly clear from the very beginning. Stylistically, it’s an achievement that shows promise for its filmmaker. Narratively, it’s as weak a film as I’ve seen at a festival in recent memory.
Better than both films combined yet somewhere adrift in a tonal space is The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer, a title so tailor-made for a Midnights’ premiere that the only reasonable explanation for its placement under the Spotlight Narrative umbrella is the fact that it stars Steve Buscemi, John Magaro, and Britt Lower. Writer-director Tolga Karacelik’s third feature is the shallow tale – yup – of a struggling writer named Keane (Magaro), whose marriage to Suzie (an acidic Lower) is in complete shambles when he encounters Kollmick (Buscemi), a man claiming to be both Keane’s biggest fan and a retired serial killer. In a drunken act of desperation, not to mention that Kollmick’s presence in their home unsettles Suzie’s sleep, Keane decides not only to write about this serial killer for his next book as opposed to the love story circa 40,000 B.C. he’d previously been toying with, but he convinces Suzie that Kollmick is a marriage counselor there to help them sort through their problems.
Not only are Keane and Kollmick the very real names of two very real characters in a movie, but Magaro and Buscemi turn this absurdist two-hander into an off-the-rails dark comedy that seems predestined to find its cult audience in due time. Buscemi turns in a wickedly curious performance as a man I can genuinely believe once killed for pleasure and now finds himself just itching to plop into his worn-out recliner to watch the Mets, while Magaro flexes his leading man muscles so vigorously that I can almost see them bursting through his knit cardigan. And yet it’s Lower who steals the show, remaining icy and suspicious in equal measure as Keane’s actions deserve more suspicion and more frigidity in response. It’s as if Lower’s innie, to reference her character on Severance’s nightmarish fate, found herself in a loveless marriage with a pompous, flailing intellectual. Brava, I say.
The Shallow Tale’s “sinister” elements – you know, those involving a retired serial killer – never land without a laugh lingering around the corner. A batshit sequence involving a man screaming at a llama about potatoes somehow doesn’t feel out of place; a taxidermied feline friend called Ada attends Keane and Suzie’s therapy sessions, and they’re meant to talk to her. Somehow, Karacelik’s feature ends up playing out like Zachary Wigon’s Sanctuary on ketamine. All the more shocking: Somehow, it works.
You won’t find three films that are more “different” with a capital “odd” at Tribeca this year, but isn’t that kind of the point? Festival programs are meant to subvert and challenge our expectations, if not to render them moot altogether. That this round of Midnight selects – along with The Shallow Tale, too fun to be left out – succeeds in doing so even without the films themselves achieving success is a testament to the section’s nature. Its films are odd, meant to be watched in the dark, and meant to make your jaw drop. Who cares if they actually screen at 9 p.m.? It’s the thought that counts.
