Return to paranormality – Newspaper Kommersant No. 209 (7410) of 11/11/2022

The film “Supernatural” was released. Signs (Something in the Dirt) by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. Starting as an ironic tale of paranormal activity in a shabby Los Angeles apartment, the film turns into an ode to the simple pleasure of making movies with friends. The audience will also be able to share it, provided that they do not wait for a coherent narrative and logical explanations for what is happening on the screen, he believes Yulia Shagelman.

The duo of cinematographers Benson and Moorhead got on the radar of fans of unusual auteur films back in 2012, when their debut film Breaking was released, filmed for only $20,000. abandoned forest hut in order to rid him of addiction in this way, but something sinister began to happen around), but the ingenuity and wit of the authors turned it into something like nothing else. Then they made a couple more of the same strange films with slightly larger, but still very modest by Hollywood standards, budgets, doing everything with their own hands. Benson usually writes scripts, Moorehead is behind the camera, editing the footage together, and in Paranormal (2017) they also played the main roles. By 2019, the film industry already believed in them so much that famous actors Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan starred in Edge of Time (although the picture turned out to be the most unsuccessful in the filmography of the directorial tandem). But most importantly, they have achieved the highest professional success of our times: interest from Netflix and Marvel, who hired them to direct episodes of the TV series “Archive 81” and “Moon Knight”, respectively.

Back to the roots – low-budget, strange, defying simple genre definition, playing mental puzzles with the audience of cinema – Benson and Moorehead were advised by the pandemic. Sitting in lockdown in 2020, they came up with a film, almost all of which takes place within the same apartment (even one room), with rare forays outside it, and, with the exception of a few episodic characters, it is mainly played for two by the authors themselves . At the same time, “Supernatural …” does not leave the claustrophobic feeling of a “quarantine” film: it’s just that this format is ideal for this story, and it does not require any additional tricks at all.

Benson plays the underdog Levi, who has just moved into the cheapest housing you can find in Los Angeles. For 20 years in this city, he never advanced beyond the bar and many started and abandoned projects, so he decided to leave the city, and spend the remaining months before leaving in an apartment whose windows overlook the wall of a neighboring house, and over the yard every now and then fly landing aircraft. Going out to shoot a cigarette, he meets John (Moorehead), the same, albeit more neatly dressed loser: a divorced wedding photographer, he earns money by returning rental electric scooters for charging, and also constantly borrows money from his ex-spouse.

Five minutes later, Levi and John are already chatting like old friends, then together they bring someone else’s old furniture from the basement into the apartment, they tell each other their stories over beer … And then an ashtray made of a piece of quartz left by the previous owner begins to soar in the air, rays of light , passing through it, add up to mysterious signs, and because of the unclosable door of the closet, it radiates with heat of unknown origin. Friends decide that this can not be ignored. But what to do with it? Start a podcast? YouTube channel? No, of course, make a documentary and sell it to Netflix for $10 million!

Trying to get to the bottom of the reasons for what is happening, John and Levi begin to see signs everywhere and try to make various conspiracy theories based on them. Electromagnetic fields are used, the number 1908 that constantly catches their eye, the secret brotherhood of Pythagoreans, the scheme of Los Angeles streets, which develops into the same pattern that is reflected on the wall from a flying ashtray, the coming Apocalypse and, of course, signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. This is both a spoken comedy and a local version of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (although, oddly enough, it does not reach the Templars, and the version of the participation of the Rosicrucians must be discarded, if only because Levi does not know how to pronounce the word “Rosicrucians”) , and a love hello to The X-Files, and a parody of numerous documentaries about the paranormal. But the main thing is the story of friendship that grew out of completely unexpected rubbish and, alas, is not appreciated until you have to lose it. One can only be glad that the friendship between Benson and Moorhead is as strong as it was ten years ago, and contracts with major studios have not pacified either their wild imagination or their trademark sense of humor.