(Maybe none of them are.) Whether the floating objects and dancing lights are random, imagined, or outright staged, what matters is that any meaning derives from the characters themselves. Their ideas are all nice and digestible, creating a pleasant hangout vibe.Īfter a point, though, it’s apparent that few of these events are meant to add up. They explore topics ranging from alien contact to concerning levels of radiation to a cult devoted to Pythagoras and his triangle theorem.
#Endless becoming apartment movie
John and Levi spend much of the movie presenting theories colored by whatever podcast they just heard, or whatever trivia snippet they’ve retained from falling down a Wikipedia hole. But it also demonstrates the film’s sense of humor: Unlike the dogged camera-wielders in the horror movies and thrillers more typical of the found-footage format, these guys just don’t have the discipline or focus to keep filming all the time. The way the film doesn’t disclose those reenactments up front deliberately adds a layer of distrust on top of an already knotty meta-movie premise. Levi and John are most often shown from the perspective of conventional cameras observing the action, in what are eventually revealed as staged reenactments Levi and John are creating for their eventual documentary.
#Endless becoming apartment archive
As with Netflix’s Archive 81, a horror series for which Benson and Moorhead directed two of the eight episodes, the footage is more of a story device than a rigid style to follow. The catch, though, is that little of the film involves the usual jittery handheld footage shot by panicking characters. The result more or less follows the story beats of a found-footage movie, complete with faux behind-the-scenes setups and interview cutaways that foreshadow an ominous incident to come. Mismatched styles and temperaments aside, they team up to film the happenings, hoping to sell the footage as a documentary to Netflix. These events, Levi and John think, are their ticket to bigger and better things. Other phenomena soon follow: mysterious heat sources, musical resonance, localized quakes, and objects seeming to appear out of thin air. They’re kindred burnouts of a sort, initially bonded by the relative affordability of a building with planes constantly screaming overhead, then by something else entirely, once they witness supernatural anomalies in Levi’s apartment.įirst, the stone they use for an ashtray begins to move on its own, refracting ethereal light and levitating. He soon meets John Daniels (Moorhead), a bespectacled churchgoer living on amateur photography gigs, a sideline working for an e-charging scooter company, and checks from his ex-husband. Levi Danube (Benson) is a new tenant, an aging bartender with a sketchy past and the long-haired look of a surfer bro. (Not least because its primary setting is Moorhead’s actual apartment.) This isn’t even the first cosmic-dread-centric head trip they’ve written and directed while also taking prominent roles in front of the camera: In 2018’s The Endless, they play brothers confronting a doomsday cult centered on time loops.įor their latest, the pair plays neighbors in a crummy Los Angeles apartment building. But while the new science fiction feature Something in the Dirt is one of those quarantine projects, it still feels a bit like coming home for Moon Knight and Synchronic directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. A lot of established filmmakers have released films about cabin fever or isolation recently - often scaled-back projects that leverage limited casts and locations to sometimes awkward effect. Sometimes it’s obvious when a film was made as a COVID-19 project.
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