Horror will always be a great way to find and achieve catharsis. Sometimes that means slow-burn elegies of grief and trauma, which have flourished over the past decade, or the visceral trips into and through mental illness that have found in montage and design a means of expressing and explaining, and the ways that we can never really escape our past. But if you had said a two-character splatterfest that does all the drugs and spills gallons of neon alien blood would somehow harness and exorcise the howl of how deeply felt friendships fray and unwind, I might have had some doubts about going into it. But you should never doubt Joe Begos — who made this film in his own apartment on 16 mm across almost four years — because tenacity like that yields unimaginable dividends.
Sustained gorefests (and this is absolutely one of those) usually work as explorations of mood and tone — the bloodlettings are percussion, with the heartbeat of the viewer in the driver’s seat and doing the kickdrum heavy lifting. But writer-director (and in this instance, star and periodic camera operator) Begos is doing something different here — initially using the Angst/Enter the Void-style subjective camera (and a litany of fucks) to immerse us inside the headspace of Jimmy Lang, an addict on the edge of a collision course with something that can’t easily be explained. Early on, it’s hard to tell if he’s functioning at all or if the emotional precipice he’s clinging to is a coping mechanism for isolation, alienation and a philosophy that can only master things by destroying them.
This is a movie for people who hate the holes they’ve punched in their walls, or just as likely the friends who’ve borne the brunt of that. Often both.
There are lots of films that address the messy tendencies of dude friendships and what happens when they meet unbreachable barriers, but none of them reach down into the bile and hurt and corrosive rage that steeps in the intersection of sincere sadness and paranoid reinforcement like Jimmy and Stiggs does.
This is not a pleasant ride in the way that many wall-painting horror films are; this is about the feelings that surge up when there’s just nothing left to put into or get out of the relationships that can define your teens and 20s. And Begos puts his heart and soul and ankles into it. I’ve always described him as if the late, great Mike Schank were a Mortal Kombat character who defaulted to baroque fatality. But the way this film digs down into the real shit lets you know this is an artist who knows the value of a purgative — with no half-measures.
When Stiggs (Matt Mercer) shows up at our Jimmy’s apartment, it’s black-box-theater sparagmos, with sobriety and toxicity entrenched and volleys of hurt and sadness. There’s a brief moment where Mercer has but a few seconds to get across the debate of whether it’s better if Jimmy is just having a psychotic break or if he has in fact been part of an alien abduction, and it’s remarkable, bringing to life all the nuances of “would that be worse” in “Annie Waits.” Just covered in goo and regret and years' worth of decisions.
There are hints at something bigger than what’s unfolding in this amazing but reasonable apartment (there is a coffee table that has Suspiria-peacock-lamp-level iconic status), something that extends into time paradoxes and drug and alcohol psychosis even before we’re engaging with the aliens: remarkable feats of design in that they simultaneously embody ridiculousness and utter terror. They’re the childhood nightmares of our titular twosome, but they’re fueled by and stuffed with all the bile and mucus and chyme and pus that come with the passage of time: entropy personified by something you can punch until it spews. Jimmy and Stiggs has a very Dr. Sandra Lee approach to catharsis.
As for the Eli Roth of it all, he mostly stays out of the way, barring a post-film behind-the-scenes debriefing where he and Begos get into the filming and locations. The fact that most ticket stubs and online listings for the film alphabetize it by "Eli Roth Presents" rather than the actual title is distracting, but this is the film Roth chose to inaugurate his own studio label, and it’s also the first of Begos’ six features to get a proper nationwide release, so there’s that. Roth also contributes two pre-film trailers that play like gangbusters, and that kind of showmanship is always worthy of some extra points.
This film isn’t for everybody. It may not even be for most people. But if you believe in the ability of horror to express that which can feel inexpressible, there is something deeply valuable here. It simply should not be as emotionally effective as it is, getting to the heart of the way friendships can fracture even as you watch one of our most distinctive genre filmmakers just wreck his home (I turned to my friend, an award-winning filmmaker, and said, “He’s never going to get his security deposit back.”) for the purpose of Technicolor mayhem. This is an exorcism on film — a great companion piece to Begos’ moody 2019 art vampire opus Bliss — and it haunts. More than the staggering array of disarticulations, exsanguinations and nonconsensual dental work, this sticks its flitting mandibles into the place in your brain where the deepest regrets live, and it leaves you behind countless brick walls, closing in on all sides, imprisoned by all that you can’t purge, and there’s only one way it can end.
