This overview is a part of our protection of the 2024 Sundance Movie Competition. It has been republished for its theatrical launch in New York.
The Pitch: It’s the summer time of 2020, and Terry Goon (John Early) is simply making an attempt to do his absolute best. He’s depressed, slovenly, a homosexual man in Brooklyn succumbing to essentially the most painful phases of twink dying. His sugar daddy husband (Bob’s Burgers’s John Roberts) has run off with an African mannequin, the occasion home he’s dwelling in is falling aside, and he has to take care of his 19-year-old nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a bedridden Moroccan mannequin with a leg harm that each one of Terry’s queer buddies suppose he’s sleeping with. So as to add a cherry on prime of this crap sundae, Terry’s woes come amid the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns — when everybody was paranoid, lonely, and waving an energetic can of Lysol at something inside attain.
However Bahlul’s presence, and the intervention of his loyal however deeply messy pal Karla (author/director Theda Hammel) and unusual, mute upstairs neighbor Coco (Rebecca F. Proper), add gasoline to the fireplace for Terry’s deteriorating psychological state. Throw in a cute GrubHub supply boy (Faheem Ali), and Karla’s culture-vulture girlfriend (Amy Zimmer), and also you’ve obtained an emotional sizzling zone no vaccine will have the ability to remedy.
Goon Cave: Whereas a bunch of coastal-comedian comedies got here out in the previous couple of years as a direct myallmovies of COVID-19’s medical and inventive restrictions (7 Days, The Bubble, How It Ends), Stress Positions is the primary of those to really feel like a real interval piece. Making considered use of her micro-budget confines, Hammel zeroes in on the mania and paranoia we felt in that horrific 12 months: uncertainty about what measures really stored us protected; hall-monitoring ours and others’ ranges of precaution; gleaning advantage from our isolation, even because it killed our souls.
A lot of that feeling is embodied in Early’s manic tackle Terry Goon, a job each straight down the barrel of his catty comedian model and an obvious try to stretch out of these labels. Terry’s a loser, a person clearly unable to take care of himself, slowed down with crippling nervousness about each facet of his existence. Every cellphone name or doorbell buzz is an energetic harm to his existence, whether or not it’s one other of his prying buddies making an attempt to catch a glimpse of the recent twink he’s internet hosting or the begrudging obligation of banging pots and pans on the appointed hour to assist healthcare staff.
Distinction that to Bahlul, the least confused character in Stress Positions — the place Terry worries about all the pieces, Bahlul displays actually and healthfully about his upbringing with a strict white Muslim mom. He responds with curiosity and pleasure to Karla’s presentation as a trans lady, taking pleasure in enjoying with gender himself. (“Not everyone’s trans!” Terry shouts to Karla after a number of makes an attempt to push Bahlul towards transitioning.) It’s a delightfully centering efficiency in a movie eclipsed by wild characters and unrelenting absurdism.
Good day To My Reflection: Talking of Karla, she looks like Stress Positions’ true protagonist, even because the movie flits from Terry to Bahlul to quite a lot of topics over its dreamlike ninety minutes. Conflicting and competing voiceovers layer over the movie’s extra meditative stretches, every coming from unreliable narrators — a grasp on the methods 2020’s lockdowns typically pressured us to look inward at our pasts, and ponder whether this may very well be a pivot level for what’s actually essential.
