Ian (Adrian DiGiovanni) hasn't left his apartment in over a year. A little agoraphobia, a lot depression. We know this because he's in the habit of speaking straight to the camera and expounding on his habits and philosophy at the drop of a hat, in slightly overwritten monologues that are articulate but maybe a little too glib, trying too hard to be clever. A very indie movie style of dialog. In any case, he's not too big on introspection or self-analysis. He's likeable enough, though.
Unsurprisingly, his place is a sty. Ian himself is a mess of sores and unkempt hair in a dirty wifebeater-underwear combo. The guy's routine consists of a haze of watching TV, with his daily trek to the bathroom to take a dump the sole highlight. It's in one of these pilgrimages that, after his TV implodes, he decides that he's had enough and attempts to kill himself by making a cocktail of bleach and sulphuric acid, trying to gas himself with chlorine.
He is not successful*; When he wakes up, it's to the dulcet tones of The Mold (Jeffrey Combs!), a sentient pile of mold that talks about itself in the third person and kind of sounds like a deranged beatnik.
After getting over Ian's initial disbelief, The Mold (never just Mold) browbeats him into getting his shit together, cleaning up his act, and fixing up his department. He also gets him to drill holes all over, which will factor later into the... well, let's be generous and call it a plot.
What we have here is a sort of surrealist chamber piece -or, to be precise, a two-chamber piece- that's mostly driven by Ian talking with The Mold, and Ian talking with us, the audience. Other characters intrude every now and then, all of them a bag of quirks, most important among them Leah (Danielle Doetsch): the girl next door and love interest whose immediate attraction for Ian, obstinate self-insertion into his life and relentless acceptance is... well, very quirky-indie-movie and kind of a bum note. Without going into spoilers it does kind of fit into the narrative by the end, but still.
As a whole the film is kind of comedic, but without a whole lot of jokes, and it's definitely going for weird for weirdness's sake. It works, mostly. I was expecting the different characters to be symbolic, or at least to have a function, but if they do, I didn't catch them. They seem to be there just to provide incident and pass the time. Their dialog is, again, a little hit-and-miss, and so is their acting, but nothing too dire. I liked the TV repairman's monologue (Robert Kramer, I think?) , and there's a pretty funny rant about breaking a chimp's arm.
Jeffrey Combs stands apart - he clearly had a blast voicing The Mold, and the script brings its A-game to all of his lines. The puppet they used for it is also extremely expressive; It's effortlessly funny and inscrutable and menacing in turns... Definitely the best character in the movie, which is as it should be.
Writer-director-editor Don Thacker's done a lot of videogame shorts (including a few widely liked ones for Devolver Digital), so I guess it shouldn't be surprising that the whole soundtrack is composed of chiptunes, or that there are animated scenes done in the style of an old videogame. This seems odd, since Ian at no point even expresses any interest in gaming.
There really is no discernible reason for that stylistic choice, but hey, it adds variety to the proceeds and it looks good, which is kind of a guiding principle here. There are aso some cool camera moves, especially at the beginning. It gets a bit flatter later but by then there's enough going on to keep things moving apace.
The film ultimately attempts to be some sort of mindfuck, but honestly I felt there's too little substance here for it to stick... even now that world events have lent it more resonance than when it was originally made back in the year of our lord 2012. It's entertaining, though, agreeably loopy, and well worth it just for Comb's performance alone.
*SPOILERS: Or... is he? Dun dun DUNNNNNN
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