Review: PVT Chat Is a Blackly Comic Depiction of Our Transactional World

Ben Hozie’s wry, observational film positions a young man’s repressed sexual paranoia as a reflection of a more general social malaise.

PVT Chat
Photo: Dark Star Pictures

Jack (Peter Vack), the protagonist of writer-director Ben Hozie’s PVT Chat, seems to suffer from a malaise not unlike that associated with hikikomori, given that he lives much of his life within the confines of his living quarters and relates to the outside world mostly through the internet. A web blackjack player by trade, Jack blows whatever money he wins on chat sessions with camgirls, with whom he seems overly intimate, almost as if he were trying to court them, though all he’s really interested in is getting off. Hozie succinctly sums up Jack’s personality and arrested development in the film’s first shot, the camera peering down the hallway of his Lower East Side apartment as he sits at a table with his pants around his ankles, masturbating as he asks a camgirl about the banal details of her life.

The camgirl, Scarlet (Julia Fox), is a dominatrix and by far Jack’s favorite. From the outset, the film depicts their interactions as darkly comical, with Jack constantly oscillating between viewing their exchange as purely transactional and speaking to her as if he were her boyfriend. For her part, Scarlet deftly strings him along, opening up about her life without ever explicitly reciprocating his feelings, obviously out of fear of losing her best customer. And Hozie cannily traces Jack’s role as a submissive in his chats with Scarlet to other areas of his life. Indeed, he’s so withdrawn that he barely gives a second thought to his landlord, Henry (Atticus Cain), going about remodeling his unit with the hopes of renting it out to someone more reliable.

As a means of disguising his sense of stagnation and failure, Jack begins to invent elaborate fictions, telling Scarlet that he’s a soon-to-be-rich tech entrepreneur who’s developing an app that will allow people to communicate telepathically. It’s a persona that neatly contrasts with the fictions that she herself erects as part of her job. Scarlet walks a fine, ambiguous line as to whether she actually believes him or not, as his dinky apartment, so lacking in finery, is always in full view to her, yet at times she cannot help but become wistful over his earnestness.

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Jack and Scarlet’s relationship takes a turn during one of his rare excursions outside his apartment, after he thinks he spots her on the street and follows her into a bodega, which confuses him as she claimed to live in San Francisco and later says that she’s never been to New York. Already obsessed with Scarlet, Jack turns amateur sleuth, allowing his projections to run wild. All this could have easily signaled PVT Chat’s pivot to stalker thriller terrain, paving the way for a condemnation of the darker side of beta-male misogyny. But Hozie settles for deepening the film’s brand of wry, observational comedy, implicating both Jack and Scarlet in a broader critique of the way that the increasing normalization of the internet as a primary means of realizing an intimate connection has also heightened the extent to which people can project whatever version of themselves they want into the world.

The double lives that Jack and Scarlet live allow Vack and Fox to give full expression to the characters’ contradictions. Vack plays Jack as a bundle of nervous, insecure energy that gives lie to his false shows of bravado, while Fox, building on her breakthrough turn in the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, brings a desperate concentration to Scarlet’s understanding of how the toll of her world-weariness is matched by her refusal to surrender to the bleaker aspects of life. If Scarlet shows a level of reciprocity to Jack’s mounting devotion to her, she never comes off as letting the lines between reality and her online persona blur the way he has.

A scene in PVT Chat finds Jack propping his laptop on a copy of Ulysses so that he can more easily chat with Scarlet while pleasuring himself, a seemingly throwaway moment that actually establishes an unlikely kinship between the film and James Joyce’s novel. Both are roaming, blackly comic character studies in which a character’s repressed sexual paranoia reflects a more general social malaise. And if Hozie’s film is more narratively driven, complete with a second half that’s chockablock with reveals and betrayals, blending romcom and noir tropes, it nonetheless culminates in an ecstatic, hopeful release not unlike Ulysses, fully centering the woman in the story in a way that frees her from the male protagonist’s limiting gaze while also identifying his good traits better than his own narcissistic self ever could.

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Score: 
 Cast: Julia Fox, Peter Vack, Heather Allison, Buddy Duress, Keith Poulson, Nikki Belfiglio  Director: Ben Hozie  Screenwriter: Ben Hozie  Distributor: Dark Star Pictures  Running Time: 85 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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