Tag Archives: Memory

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SOUL TO SQUEEZE (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: W.M. Weikart

FEATURING: Michael Thomas Santos, Danielle Meyer

PLOT: Jacob signs up for a dangerous psychological treatment to overcome his anger issues and finds himself trapped within a small home.

Still from Soul to Squeeze (2025)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Soul to Squeeze doesn’t wear its metaphor on its sleeve so much as encase the protagonist. This narrative framework allows for a psychological deep-dive which proffers as much ambiguity as it does clarity.

COMMENTS: A young fellow emerges from debris on the roadside. He’s bleary-eyed, but looks content—even happy. In fact, he’s doing so well that, when a kindly passerby offers help, he politely declines. The preceding ordeal nearly broke him, for this trash pile is the site of a rebirth. As he limps to the roadside, it is clear that our protagonist, Jacob, has had his soul squeezed, but not how you might think.

Certainly not how I thought, until some days after watching the movie when the title’s implications finally became clear. Weikart uses a number of tools to form the narrative, but a television documentary (which seems to be the only channel available where Jacob’s locked himself away for “treatment”) is nearly as omnipresent as the allegorical house the film was shot in. Alongside Jacob, we learn about the mysteries and wonders of the eye: its nerves, cones, strata, apertures, and, most importantly, the aqueous humour. You’ll develop an understanding and appreciation of this unlikely organ from watching Soul to Squeeze, if nothing else.

Jacob’s ordeal begins immediately upon signing the medical release for an unclear procedure—someone, or some force, locks the exit the moment he lifts the pen from the contract line. As Jacob angrily goes through his routines in confinement, he encounters an array of characters who probably aren’t there, though it’s difficult to be certain. (Surely there isn’t a kitchen game show titled “Don’t Fuck This Up!” lying in wait to pounce on the unsuspecting breakfaster.) As the story unfolds, and Jacob’s psychological journey dives deeper into the source of his omnipresent anger, the surrounding pressure of recollection and contemplation forces him (and us) to focus on his true ailment.

The documentary narrator explains: we know much about the hardware involved inside the eye, but there’s no concrete theory as to why it all works. As with the eye (a window to the soul, we’ve been told), so with the mind. Weikart’s one-set drama, putting actor Michael Thomas Santos through the wringer, features much that is obvious. But like an eye (which comes up as much in this review almost as much as in the film), it transcends the sum of its parts through an alchemical process that cannot be easily dissected into its constituent parts without destroying it. Apologies if I’ve veered too far into bio-philosophical rambling, but that’s just the kind of thing Soul to Squeeze catalyzes. With a little focus, life’s debris can be put into perspective, and you are free to move on in the world.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s a haunting stillness to the production design—this is not a surrealist explosion of dream logic, but something more intimate and grounded… for those willing to surrender to its slow, aching rhythm and deeply personal approach, it offers something rare: a film that doesn’t just explore the mind—it mirrors it” — Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: THE ACTOR (2025)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: André Holland, , May Calamaway, Asim Chaudhry, Joe Cole, Fabien Frankel, , , , Youssef Kerkour, Simon McBurney, Tanya Reynolds, , Scott Alexander Young

PLOT: An actor in the 1950s loses his memory after being struck in the head by a jealous husband, and winds up in a small Ohio town trying to puzzle out his own identity.

Still from the actor (2025)

COMMENTS: For his solo debut feature, protege Duke Johnson takes on a neurological  dysfunction; but whereas his  mentor would tackle an ambitiously exotic condition like Cotard’s syndrome or Fregoli syndrome, Johnson restricts his theme to humble amnesia. Paul, an actor, is struck on the head with a chair when caught in bed with another man’s wife. He wakes up in a hospital with no memory—he has to be told his name and occupation—and is almost immediately run out of town by a detective who warns him that adultery is against the law and he’ll be arrested if he returns. He knows he is from New York City, but doesn’t have enough pocket change for a ticket there, so he ends up in a small Midwestern town working at a tannery. While there, he meets and romances nice—if eccentric—small-town gal Edna, but leaves her behind once he’s saved up enough for a bus ticket back to the Big Apple. In the big, wicked city, his former friends (a roguish lot) treat him like nothing has changed, despite the fact that he doesn’t remember them, and his agent gets him a small comeback role on a TV show. But will the fact that he can’t even remember names that were told to him a few minutes ago affect his prospects as a thespian?

Johnson’s uses blatant theatrical artifice to suggest Paul’s disorientation. Scenes are staged like a big budget play or a low-budget TV show. A third-person narrator occasionally interjects exposition. Some of the streets Paul walks through look like they are built on studio backlots, with large swaths of blackness disguising the emptiness of the warehouse. Elements from a cartoon bleed into the real world. His own life shows up on everyone’s favorite program “A Silent Heart” (which appears to be the only TV show in existence in Paul’s world). Paul discovers that some real items in his house look like impractical stage props. An invisible wipe tracks his journey from an interior to an exterior location. Voices may be slightly out of sync, and he glimpses vaguely familiar faces. Doctors try recovering memories through “narcoserum”-aided hypnotic regression, leading to a dream sequence that’s only slightly mistier than his regular reality. Paul’s cameo casting in “The Silent Heart” (which, not by accident, involves a trial) throws him into a Kafkaesque nightmare where his self-confidence in what he assumes is his own acting talent is overwhelmed by the reality that he is not capable of processing what’s going on around him. All of this creates an impressively dreamlike world, putting us in the mindset of an amnesiac for whom the world operates according to familiar tropes, yet feels unreal in its concrete details.

What “really happens” in The Actor is, for the most part, easily determined. But the confusing part is what it all means—why bother to tell this story that seems to arrive nowhere? Amnesia, in and of itself, is not usually the subject of a narrative, but a rather common (even a clichéd) device for seeding a mystery. Here, there’s no great reveal—not on the plot, the psychological, the thematic, or the metaphysical levels—although we frequently get the sense that some epiphany is just about to arrive. The colorblind casting ( was originally intended to play the lead) isn’t especially distracting, but seems to be a missed opportunity for adding another layer to the story; amnesiac or not, a black actor’s experiences in Jim Crow America would have a vastly different character than a white actor’s. In the end, the movie plays like nothing more than a dreamy demonstration of the life of an amnesiac, with no discernible deeper message beyond “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” The fact that so many of The Actor‘s individual scenes create such effective senses of disorientation and anticipation makes the movie’s refusal to ultimately resolve itself an underwhelming and slightly frustrating experience. It’s a film that somehow manages to be intriguing without becoming actually interesting; its fascinations are entirely formal and theoretical. You should still probably check out whatever Johnson tries next, though; he has his cinematic technique down.

A word about that large cast: after Holland and Chan, the rest are listed in the opening credits simply as “the Troupe.” It’s reminiscent of the collective credit “the Mercury Actors” in Citizen Kane, and as in that movie, the end credits show clips revealing who played which role. Recognizing the actors is one of the unexpected minor treats of The Actor.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a weird, trippy, movie that has themes of reinventing oneself when you think it is too late to do so. André Holland is incredible.”–Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: THE UNRAVELING (2023)

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The Unraveling is available for VOD purchase or rental.

DIRECTED BY: Kd Amond

FEATURING: Sarah Zanotti, Sam Brooks, Katherine Morgan, Moiba Mustapha

PLOT: Mary suffers a traumatic brain injury during a car crash and thereafter is convinced her husband isn’t the man he says he is.

Still from The Unraveling (2023)

COMMENTS: Kd Amond pulls off an impressive stunt with The Unraveling. Her latest film skates around genre labels like her protagonist skirts around certainty: the film isn’t really horror, though it flirts with the genre—and the same goes for thriller, drama, romance, science fiction, and, unfortunately for us, weird. This refusal to be pigeonholable (Merriam, get me on the line) is a credit to Ms. Amond, even if it risks alienating fans of specifically horror, thriller, drama, romance, science fiction, and weird movies. We are presented with and, especially, left with a wiggly specimen of narrative, whose unreliability and oddness ultimately makes sense but raises the question: What is The Unraveling for? And, for whom?

Mary’s navigation of domesticity is vexed, as her husband (played by Sam Brooks, sporting a haircut I wish I had half the confidence for) fluctuates between a bit too understanding and a bit too controlling. We’re somewhat reliably informed that she recently suffered a traumatic brain injury: hence, her conviction that her husband is not who he says he is, and that her actual husband is a mysterious voice at the other end of her phone, speaking from a parallel reality. We are told she has difficulty with specific faces—while she may respond positively to the voice of her “husband” from another room, immediately upon seeing him she thinks him an impostor. So her days are filled with apprehension and confusion, beginning each morning when she wakes up in a bed with someone she is certain she doesn’t know.

Obviously throwing a baby into the mix is exactly the wrong thing to do, but that becomes a major plot point for the third act. Now, by this juncture the genre nearly tips into the realm of lifetime melodrama (or, considering the introduction of snowscape to the remote home’s exterior, perhaps even Hallmark). While following this pachinko of a plot line, I succumbed myself to Mary’s confusion: where are events heading? That I continued to invest myself in the film’s digressionary tendencies is a credit to Sarah Zanotti, who imbues Mary with a quietly desperate humanity.

To unravel a piece of knit-work is termed “frogging”, and leaping into a metaphor here, frogging is an apt one for Amond’s film. All the ducks, diving, and dodging of a frogger in their efforts to return to an error-free stage of the project are a bit exhausting. In that way, The Unraveling handily conveys its subject’s experience; but the open question I had at the finale was: Has this been worth the energy?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Unraveling was a strange movie and for a long time I wasn’t really even sure if it could be classified as a horror.”–Daniel Simmonds, The Rotting Zombie (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: SLINGSHOT (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Mikael Håfström

FEATURING: Casey Affleck, Emily Beecham, , Tomer Capone

Still from Slingshot (2024)

PLOT: Nearing Jupiter’s orbit, John develops growing concerns about the structural integrity of his craft and the mental well-being of its crew.

COMMENTS: Laurence Fishburne is obviously enjoying himself. Tomer Capone looks on the verge of a mental breakdown. Emily Beecham is either too wily—or not wily enough. And Casey Affleck, well, it’s kind of hard to say. Some critics have described his performance in unenthusiastic terms, with phrases like “phoned-in” bandied about. However, Affleck’s turn as John the astronaut, a man on a deep space mission kicked in and out of induced hibernation, rang true to me. John’s reactions, and perceptions, are muted, to be sure; but I can’t imagine a better frame of mind for his isolated ordeal.

Early on in the film, we are provided a good enough reason for this trip to Europa, a planet-sized moon orbiting Jupiter whose gravitational pull is to be utilized as a “slingshot” to send the exploration craft (dubbed “Odyssey”—’cause why not?—and frankly, the kind of name I can see a big-tech consortium thinking as both classy and clever) to the methane-rich moon in question. However, there’s a strange malfunction early on. Is it an impact? …Sabotage? John’s captain, Franks (Fishburne, delightful), is adamant that they crew should trust the vessel’s sensors when they say there’s nothing to worry about. The onboard astrophysics expert, Nash (Capone, frazzled), is immediately certain the team is heading toward their death. And John kind of just floats between the two views, while occasionally seeing and hearing hallucinations about the girl he left behind.

Slingshot is firmly along the indie lines of Moon, but with three closely knit characters growing more and more anxious. The vessel design takes inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey (and writing that just now, I notice it also drew the shuttle’s moniker from that film), so everything looks like whizzy, astro-chic IKEA. The sharp delineation of the craft makes for a nice contrast to the fuzziness of the narrative. Director Mikael Håfström begins the story mid-voyage, catching the audience up with extensive use of flashbacks. (I had mixed feelings about this, as the film might have played better with scanter backstory; that said, plenty of viewers are less forgiving of ambiguity.) Tensions rise, orders are disobeyed, and—trapped on some glorified tin some hundreds of millions of miles from home—we mysteriously find a firearm’s been thrown in the mix.

So we have here a chamber drama with an unreliable narrator and the pleasure of three very different actors having the screws turned on them. It’s a small movie with simple pleasures, and a triple-shot of plot twists wrapping up the low key adventure. Disagreeing with other reviews, I think Casey Affleck should be commended for his subdued performance. To reference another Kubrick film, he’s much like Barry Lyndon in this way: he will take the good and bad developments with equal magnanimity, never batting an eye because: he’s there. And this is happening. We should all aspire to be so calm when our habitat is mysteriously smashed and those in charge menace our survival with deadly weapons.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“At its best, the film manages to capture the forlornness and desperation John experiences on his long, strange trip, and Affleck does a good job conveying that tone as he keeps waking up and going to sleep, over and over.”–Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: QUANTUM COWBOYS (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Geoff Marslett

FEATURING: Kiowa Gordon, John Way, Lily Gladstone, Patrick Page, , , Alex Cox

PLOT: After three years in prison, Frank reunites with his pal Bruno to affirm that a murdered musician is alive; meanwhile, Colfax and Depew pursue increasingly desperate measures to remove themselves from a simultaneously occurring time-loop.

Still from Quantum Cowboys (2022)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Good times, looping and otherwise, await the viewer in this multivariously-animated adventure, with its scattered reality monitored by an all-observant supernatural entity, his recording crew—and his cat.

COMMENTS: Quantum Cowboys plays like the fun-time menace of The Endless fused with the philosophizing of  Waking Life, with a story unfolding in the late 19th-century Arizona Territory. If that comparison doesn’t do it for you, I got others. While director Geoff Marslett hasn’t made a wholly new phenomenon, in the manner of igneous rock spewed from cinema’s core, he has through precedent and pressure forged a metamorphic rock, squeezing genres, tropes, and ideas into a film different from what has come before. And all its inner weirdness is coated with such easygoing charm that only upon reflection does the viewer realize a whole lot of odd stuff just happened.

Four layers of narrative interact and interlay as Quantum Cowboys unfolds. A pair of nobodies—sly Frank and honest Bruno (Kiowa Gordon and John Way)—shovel horse droppings as a band plays to a small crowd at the opening of a railway station. Mischief leads to tragedy when a US Marshall pursuing Frank for petty robbery shoots the band leader. Meanwhile, the traveling salesmen Colfax and Depew (David Arquette and Frank Mosley, the latter looking like a dead-ringer for a younger version of the former) attempt to make bank by importing ideas from the future to sell to the past. Looming in the background is the charmingly earthy Linde, whose ambitions include land acquisition by way of matrimony with a white man. Looming over everything is Memory, who attempts to fuse these various observed paths into a coherent, single reality.

Frank is our reluctant hero, pulled into the time travel nonsense triggered by Colfax and Depew, our reluctant villains. Frank didn’t experience personal growth during a three-year prison stint for robbery, but his release, and the unlikely events immediately following, set him on a path toward maturity—but one that can only conclude happily if he can engineer an outcome that doesn’t leave everybody dead. Scattered amidst his journey are plenty of alt-country music luminaries (such as Neko Case), as well as Alex Cox as a preacher only somewhat anchored to any given timeline. Bruno, with his simple outlook and honorable ways, gives Frank—and the film—a focal point; Frank needs his friend for direction, and his friend needs someone to direct.

I could easily tell that everyone involved had a good time, from the the sanguine trio serving as Memory’s recording crew to the multi-roled John Doe, who has no time for the other John Doe’s tuneless musicianship and coolly shoots up John Doe’s tavern to silence an unpleasant cacophony. Geoff Marslett and co-writer Howe Gelb (an Arizona-born singer-songwriter) let their animation team do their thing, making for a visual style that’s a coherent variation on being everywhere at once. The music rocks with a twang, the performers ooze charm, and the action gyrates to a delightful finale of friendship triumphing over obsession. As Linde observes the day after her nuptials, “Nothing’s meant to be. Especially this.” Quantum Cowboys probably shouldn’t exist, but, thankfully, here it is for our enjoyment.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“May I be the first to crown Quantum Cowboys the new king of the psychedelic western? Visually it beats El Topo to the draw. It makes your brain slide further across the theater floor than Greaser’s Palace.” — Michael Talbot-Haynes, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

Quantum Cowboys [Blu-ray]

Quantum Cowboys [Blu-ray]
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