John Early In Pandemic Hell

This evaluation is a part of our protection of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

The Pitch: It’s the summer season of 2020, and Terry Goon (John Early) is simply making an attempt to do his best possible. He’s depressed, slovenly, a homosexual man in Brooklyn succumbing to probably the most painful levels 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 residing in is falling aside, and he has to look after his 19-year-old nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a bedridden Moroccan mannequin with a leg damage that every one of Terry’s queer buddies assume 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 lively can of Lysol at something inside attain.

However Bahlul’s presence, and the intervention of his loyal however deeply messy good friend 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 acquired an emotional sizzling zone no vaccine will have the ability to remedy.

Goon Cave: Whereas a number of coastal-comedian comedies got here out in the previous few years as a direct consequence 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 even handed 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 truly stored us secure; 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 look after himself, slowed down with crippling anxiousness about each facet of his existence. Every telephone name or doorbell buzz is an lively damage to his existence, whether or not it’s one other of his prying buddies making an attempt to catch a glimpse of the new 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 careworn character in Stress Positions — the place Terry worries about every part, Bahlul displays truthfully 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 all people’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.

Hi there To My Reflection: Talking of Karla, she looks like Stress Positions’ true protagonist, even because the movie flits from Terry to Bahlul to a wide range 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 necessary.