Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have had a great run so far, spinning high concept ideas with tiny budgets (except for that one time Disney let them direct Moon Knight) and they are back with another mind-bending indie filmed during the beginning of the pandemic. All of the pandemic film markers are there: small crew and sparse locations, but that doesn’t stop this film from feeling enormous and intricate.
We are introduced to two men who are at the low end of their lives, Levi (Benson) a bartender who has grown tired of surviving in LA and John (Moorhead) an intense and bookish dude who is nursing his emotional wounds after going through a messy divorce with his ex-husband. Levi has sold nearly all of his possessions and is hunkering down in an empty month-to-month apartment. He meets John outside in the complex courtyard one day and they immediately hit it off. John offers Levi some old furniture and as he is helping him move it into his place they both witness a beautiful and mysterious paranormal phenomenon involving Levi’s crystal ashtray, which sets off a series of events where they try to document what is going on and get to the bottom of what is causing it.
The film is partly constructed like a faux-documentary with “experts” weighing in on what happened to the two men, but it also switches back to what is happening in real-time with their investigation. There is some satire going on here, with John suggesting that they sell their finished documentary to Netflix, the official home of trashy ghost and true crime docs, and the film itself is made to look like it could be one of those shows.
Lots of time is spent on a myriad of conspiracies and convoluted plot threads with well-edited snappy cut-aways and asides. The further the narrative goes the more layers are added with no attempt to tie anything together, but this is on purpose, slyly poking fun at conspiracy theorists. It is a deconstruction of apophenia, the urge to seek patterns in random occurrences, to bring meaning to chaos. Levi and John have abandoned their own disordered lives to try to figure out something new, to finally solve a puzzle, and it consumes them.
While Something in the Dirt certainly shows its limited budget, the FX are actually not too bad, though they are used a bit sparingly. Benson and Moorhead play around with this idea by adding a sort of meta aspect to the story wherein Levi and John lose some of their documentary footage and essentially have to “reshoot” some events and get it finished by a special effects guy posthaste which explains the cheapness of some of the shots. Essentially, this turns them into unreliable narrators, further obfuscating the already dense story.
Benson and Moorhead have an easy chemistry together, which makes their interactions with each other on screen relatable and believable. The comedy is low-key but it is often interrupted by tense scenes where it is obvious the two men are fucking with things they should not be, and John eventually starts slipping into a kind of paranoia-induced madness. Something in the Dirt isn’t really about ghosts, it’s about people and the trauma and terrible feelings that they hide within themselves.
–Michelle Kisner
