Review: The Scary of Sixty-First Gleefully and Defiantly Captures the Zeitgeist

The directorial debut of actress and controversial leftist podcaster Dasha Nekrasova, The Scary of Sixty-First captures the zeitgeist, for better or worse. The story focuses on two twentysomething friends, Addie (Betsey Brown) and Noelle (Madeline Quinn), who reluctantly sign a lease for a suspiciously affordable apartment in New York’s Upper East Side. Turns out, the bargain is tied to the pad’s troubled past, as disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein previously used it as part of his international sex-trafficking ring, at least according to a mysterious, drug-addled conspiracy theorist (Nekrasova) who shows up out of the blue one night and soon ropes Noelle into her investigations of the case.

Shot on 16mm stock with a grimy neon hue, the film feels swallowed up by a claustrophobic haze, with frequent shots of imposing Manhattan architecture complementing its cramped interiors and ominous synth score. Though the aesthetic is undeniably reminiscent of a giallo, as well as the work of Brian De Palma, Roman Polanski, and other purveyors of New Hollywood paranoiac cool, The Scary of Sixty-First isn’t just a retro pastiche. With its heightened, allusive sense of unreality, the film gives a more accurate representation of our current cultural moment—one defined by the unending doom of a 24-hour news cycle, all-night Google binges, and isolating financial precarity—than an objective depiction could ever hope to do.

Under the influence of Nekrasova’s conspiracy theorist, Noelle plunges deeper down an internet rabbit hole in search of the truth about Epstein’s alleged suicide and the strange occult symbols they encounter in her apartment and around town, while Addie starts to exhibit some odd behavior that hints at her connections to the case. As its low-key opening devolves into lurid exploitation, The Scary of Sixty-First pulls off an interesting tonal balance, with a morbid, deadpan sense of humor occasionally peeking out to take the edge off of some of the more outlandish plot developments. The film fully indulges its trashy premise and its characters’ conspiratorial mania without losing sight of how laughable the whole affair often is, and Nekrasova in particular exudes great timing and gets in some amusing line deliveries.

In a way, The Scary of Sixty-First feels like a true heir to the petulant, low-budget horror cinema of the ’70s and ’80s; as sloppy and ridiculous as it can be, there’s a cathartic bite to its social commentary, and it dares to cross boundaries of decorum in a way that’s alien to most contemporary prestige shockers. When one female character masturbates furiously outside Epstein’s former home, or demands that her boyfriend (Mark Rapaport) role-play as a pedophile aboard a Boeing 727 (the type of plane used as the so-called “Lolita Express,” a critical setting for Epstein’s predatory activities), the film’s transgressive absurdity more than compensates for its lack of psychological realism or narrative coherence. There’s also a hint of Trouble Every Day in the film, in the way it plays with genre tropes and privileges sensation over plot, though it never scales the heights of Claire Denis’s feverish eroticism.

The Scary of Sixty-First will feel like cheap provocation to some, what with its ripped-from-the-headlines timeliness, and it doesn’t have much of substance to say about trauma, abuse of power, or the conspiracy mindset. But there’s defiance in its gleeful excess, a potential force of resistance to a deadening, hyper-normalized cultural climate where everything is spectacle, and where something as shocking as the Epstein scandal can quickly seem passé. In certain moments, like the dramatic reveal of a commemorative spoon adorned with an image of British royal and Epstein affiliate Prince Andrew, it’s difficult to not to go along with the film’s central thesis: that the existence of a global elite pedophile network is, like so many aspects of our contemporary socio-political landscape, both horrifyingly real and a strange, sick joke.