Another low-budget, slow-burn, character-driven avant-garde sci-fi/horror movie from Benson & Moorhead, the creative team behind the (very similar) films 'Resolution' and 'The Endless'.
It's theoretically the "weakest" of these three films, with characters who seem to have been deliberately designed to have little lasting chemistry between them, even more ambiguous/enigmatic plot elements, theme and resolution than usual for the low-budget films made by this team, limits on what could be done due to ad-hoc filming through the unexpected COVID lockdowns, and some experimental documentary/found-footage elements that might not gel for many viewers, but somehow it managed to get under my skin anyway, and has rewarded my subsequent viewings.
The two main characters, an almost bankrupt slacker on a sex offender registry who feels like he has been suspended at the terminal velocity of free-fall for his entire life, and an equally broke and strangely cold and aloof recent divorcee who seems to lack any direction or meaning in his life, do not at first realize that a strange series of coincidences has led to their becoming new neighbors at just the right moment to witness a strange supernatural phenomenon, setting them in motion together at last on creating a documentary about it, which soon leads the two men down a series of endless rabbit-holes pursuing fringe scientific theories, weird occult conspiracy theories, and ultimately some explanation for who they are and why they even exist, leading up to the film's final, enigmatic plot twist.
Viewers familiar with Benson & Moorhead's previous films should probably know what to expect from the otherworldly aspects of the film: these are not really the main part of the movie, and the puzzle behind them will not be given any direct, clear solution for the audience, which will be free to come up with many of their own conclusions.
Instead, it's the interaction and development between the two main characters that is the main point and focus of these movies, and this is where the movie may get a little rocky for some fans: unlike 'Resolution', 'The Endless', 'Spring', and 'Synchronic', which all build up to character epiphanies and resolutions of the conflicts that fueled most of their interactions, 'Something in the Dirt' tries something a little different: we know from the other movies that Benson and Moorhead can portray characters with chemistry between them, but in this film the chemistry seems to have been deliberately crafted to be a bit "off" - something this creative team has mentioned in interviews about the film, but which is also directly called out by the main characters themselves in reference to the strange interactions between electromagnetism, gravity, sound, and other phenomena that seem to interact to produce the phenomena, but never really seem to connect in any meaningful way, leading ultimately to the two characters falling into an unresolved conflict and the movie's central mystery being left hanging in the ether with disastrous results.
And that brings me to other technical decisions in the film, most notably the found-footage/documentary aspect, which seems to have been a late addition in the film production as the film-makers assembled the film and imagined what the resulting documentary might look like. The result is maybe the most avant-garde aspect of the movie: it's mostly pretty clearly a traditional low-budget "guerilla" film of its kind in which we are omniscient viewers watching things unfold in the movie from outside, but found footage, reenactments, interviews, and other documentary elements from a very different style of movie are intercut with the more traditional movie, resulting in a strange, hybrid film-making approach that, on paper, shouldn't work, and again will probably not sit comfortably with most viewers.
Yet, this strange, conflicted film-making approach that imperfectly melds the detached, traditional storytelling approach with the more immersive documentary approach seems to work for me, in no small part because, whether intentionally or not, it seems to fit what Benson and Moorhead seem to have been trying to do with this movie: it's like two very different personalities and motives were making two very different sorts of films, and the result intersected imperfectly somewhere close to the truth, but not close enough to ever quite make sense of the mystery. Many viewers will, I think, recognize that something is "off" about the movie, without consciously realizing why it's "off", and how the strange creative choices work in the bigger scheme of the movie (and perhaps, sadly, many viewers will never really see a reason to try to work out the movie's bigger puzzle!)
These are unorthodox storytelling decisions which, I think, will leave a lot of viewers cold, but there seems to be a method to this madness, a logic that seems to work for me, at least, drawing me back into puzzle-solving mode again and again to try to figure out what it all meant, and why it ultimately failed to work out in-universe, and perhaps as a film - I think that any film that can get that far under my skin is doing something right, and ultimately I think 'Something in the Dirt" holds its own against the stronger and more popular movies made by Benson & Moorhead.
In the end, I rather like the film - maybe not quite as much as 'Resolution' or 'The Endless', but I can still appreciate it for exploring much the same territory as those two earlier films, but doing something quite a bit different and more experimental with the techniques and material that the creative team have already mastered in their earlier efforts.
The result may not have been perfect, but, like 'Resolution' and 'The Endless', it was certainly not quite like anything I've ever seen before, I never felt like there was a dull moment in the film, and the story's central mysteries and themes seem to have stuck with me long after the end credits rolled, with each subsequent viewing revealing a little something new that I never noticed before, and I really couldn't ask for very much more than that out of a film like this.
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