Something in the Dirt

 Two strangers living in the same ratty apartment building - one a seemingly together (ex) math professor, the other one a slightly burnt-out bartender with a checkered past, discover that one of the apartments they're renting has frequent localized paranormal events. Basically, a crystal ashtray starts floating and emitting light.
 So they decide to make a documentary about it. And... there's not much more to the movie than that, except that there is. It's hard to talk about this movie without spoiling its weirdo appeal.

 That it's weird shouldn't surprise anybody who's seen any other movies from the team behind it. It's written, directed and stars Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (partly produced and edited by them as well; Moorhead was in charge of cinematography). But it is a little surprising just how weird it is. For all their bizarro ideas and wonky science, all their previous movies carefully incorporated Hollywood conventions and a clear narrative to at least try and make them more accessible.

 This is their prickliest, most internal and experimental film to date. Ostensibly a narrative feature, intercut with scenes from the documentary the characters are making, what it actually is becomes trickier to pin down as it becomes clear that they have been filming recreations of the events we've seen, and that we may be watching recreations of recreations.
 And it's complicated by, well, their complicated relationship. It's fraught from the beginning; Even though they hit it off initially, they're still strangers, and since the phenomena they're trying to document is in one of their rooms, there's a queasy thread of paranoia running throughout as the duo start fighting about the project.
 There's also the strange goings-on they're investigating, with a mess of weird concepts, coincidences and seemingly related factoids that start coming to light as they start digging deeper: from transdimensional emanations to Jack Parsons (!) and from there to Pythagorean Mystery Cults (!!). Not so much a single thread as a tangled web of conflicting pseudo-explanations.

Yes, the hanging Matryoshka dolls in the middle are thematic. Also, this is one of the rare scenes in the movie where the two characters are in the frame together.

 The investigation into the central mystery, then, is an exercise in futility by design. And ultimately... it's not what's important here. The characters themselves are, and most of the movie is about watching these two people who feel life hasn't served them right try to use this opportunity to make sense of  things, get lost in their personal interpretations of the event, and escalate the friction between their discordant personalities.
 It's often pretty funny, and (at least I found it to be) always engaging. The performances are fine, but the writing feels off sometimes, a little too artificial- a lot of times I could see what they were going for but it didn't really feel natural. Their theories to explain the paranormal stuff come off as superficial, too, so the 'mystery box' aspect of the movie isn't very compelling.
 And finally - and this is not really a complaint, per se, but it is something that may block enjoyment of the film: while a lot of stuff does happen, it doesn't, again by design, have a satisfactory ending or even a satisfactory trajectory if the movie's wavelength doesn't resonate with you. The movie is completely preoccupied with its own concerns, utterly absorbed in its own headspace... as befits the subject matter.

 But there's a lot to like here if you do find that you want to dig in. It all comes down (in my interpretation) to the rabbit holes we disappear into, what makes us want to go down them, and the degrees to which we refuse to come out, possibly shutting out or even hurting others. Timely.

 And if nothing else, we finally have a good companion piece to The Alchemist's Cookbook; Now that's a sentence I never really expected to write.