Between the likes of Host, Bo Burnham’s Inside and Jacob Estes’s He’s Watching, there’s a respectable pandemic oeuvre emerging – and Something in the Dirt is one of the best yet. This sci-fi-dusted paean to Los Angeles slackerdom is fairly typical for the lockdown genre: a torrent of self-involved invention about not much more than the process of its own creation. But director-stars Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead approach their two-hander with a sly humour and wonderment that prevents it from disappearing up its own fundament.
The film could also be plausibly filed in the LA esoterica category, alongside Mulholland Drive and Under the Silver Lake. Drifter John (Moorhead) moves into the same apartment complex as long-time denizen Levi (Benson), where they witness a strange, scintillating anomaly in his living room that levitates a crystal ashtray and creates spiral patterns on the wall. Initially believing it to be a ghost, they decide to make a documentary about it to snare a Netflix deal. Then Levi, an unblinking adherent to an apocalyptic church, begins noticing these same geometrical patterns everywhere around the city, in brickwork, signs and the like.
Unusually, the meta documentary aspect isn’t used to ironise the terrain inwards, but instead to broaden the scope of insular male obsessions out into the unknown. In staging their reconstructions of these paranormal incidents, John and Levi are engaging in the same game as the overseers of the universe-simulation they believe could be trying to get in touch: curating their own reality. Their compulsive meaning-making always seems to work to this end, as the net of their speculations widens: extraterrestrials, modern-day Pythagorean cults, Morse messages revealed in the seed of alien fruit. Levi finally starts to sift John’s fragmentary backstory, too – revealing something unsettling about himself in the process.
Something in the Dirt is so high on its own conceptual supply that it doesn’t invest quite enough in the pair’s deteriorating relationship, and consequently starts to drag. But it wrings a mini-cosmos out of next to nothing, its delicately transcendent visuals – courtesy of Moorhead’s photography background – constantly signposting some higher truth just around the next corner. The film is dedicated to “making movies with your friends”; Benson and Moorhead moonlight for the Marvel machine, but hopefully in their parallel reality cinema is more on these lines.
• Something in the Dirt is released in cinemas on 4 November and on digital platforms on 28 November.
