Something in the Dirt Review: A Playful Puzzle Box About Camaraderie in the Face of Doom

The film’s sheer fun and invention counterbalance its main characters’ abject failure in their search for meaning and success.

Something in the Dirt
Photo: Aaron Moorhead

If writer-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Something in the Dirt straddles an array of genres and influences, so that it might be described as a math-fi black comedy slash paranormal investigation mockumentary puzzle box, it nonetheless begins and ends as a drama of serendipitous friendship, of camaraderie in the face of doom. At the eye of a storm of paranoic simulacra worthy of Philip K. Dick, the collaborative process between Benson and Moorhead triumphs not just in spite of but because of this project’s low-budget minimalism.

On the outer fringes of an L.A. devoid of Hollywood romanticism, washed-up bartender Levi (Benson) moves into a dilapidated apartment—no lease, sight unseen. Aside from a bizarre crystalline ashtray, the space is unfurnished, leaking, and infested by skittering critters, with mathematical equations scrawled in the closet by some previous tenant.

Out in the yard, Levi spots his neighbor, John (Moorhead), a recently divorced evangelical Christian who still lives off his ex-husband, and bums a cigarette off him. The two hit it off despite having little in common. Their casual repartee contrasts with the film’s apocalyptic atmosphere: the jet liners flying low over the area; the plume of smoke from a nearby forest fire in the background; and the spatter of what appears to be blood on John’s button-down shirt.

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When the ashtray begins to levitate and emit an ethereal light, Levi and John assume it’s a poltergeist and decide to make a documentary. Before long, all manner of coincidences and patterns start cropping up. Spliced-in interviews with a chemist, a special effects expert, and Levi and John themselves reveal that Something in the Dirt is, ostensibly, the documentary that they’re trying to make, or even a making-of documentary of that documentary.

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Benson and Moorhead’s script embellishes to comedic effect the cocktail of anxiety, resignation, and curiosity that characterizes millennial speech. The editing, meanwhile, takes a cue from documentaries that illustrate narration with archival footage, putting an at times ironic, at times melancholy, spin on it. When Justin refers to the construction of the pyramids as an example of an “unsolved mystery,” we see a biblical drawing of slaves dragging a giant stone slab over logs as John says, “The pyramids aren’t a mystery anymore. I saw this YouTube video. They’re just ramps and wet sand.” In contrast, when John brings up his grandmother, a home video stands in for his memories of her. Rare for fiction film, this montage technique shows how steeped our minds have become in visual information, much of it dubious.

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As John and Levi follow the rabbit hole deeper and the coincidences amass, the tonal arc of the film pivots from an X-Files-like eeriness to (intentional) bathos, and their search for meaning takes on a desperation of its own. It becomes tricky to disentangle what’s literally happening and what’s a reenactment staged for the documentary—all the more so as John and Levi’s substance intake intensifies. It’s at this point that the film comes into its own as a study of the sort of thinking that looks for connections regardless of logic. If John is the Mulder of Something in the Dirt, dazzled by his own conspiracy theories about, say, the Pythagorean Brotherhood, Benson is the Scully, increasingly skeptical of the whole enterprise.

Even though Something in the Dirt pokes holes in the search for capital-G grand unifying theories, it doesn’t come off as nihilistic. The film’s sheer invention counterbalances Levi and John’s abject failure in their search for meaning and success. This inventiveness makes for an exceptional lockdown film, insofar as it channels the peculiar feeling of isolation, exhilaration, and terror of lockdown without having to be about a pandemic, while also making use of the limitations imposed on film production to tell a story that’s sui generis while still being fun.

Score: 
 Cast: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead  Director: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead  Screenwriter: Justin Benson  Distributor: XYZ Films  Running Time: 116 min  Rating: R  Year: 2022

William Repass

William Repass’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. For links to his published writing, click here.

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