Something In The Dirt

After neighbors John and Levi witness some shocking supernatural events in their Los Angeles apartment building, documenting these paranormal occurances initially adds purpose to their otherwise unremarkable lives, but their efforts soon turn into an obsession that threatens to consume them both.

Something in the Dirt is set in an LA on fire, the air filled with choking clouds of smoke, wailing sirens, helicopters, and incessantly buzzing signals. This is where two aimless young men, drifting though unsatisfying lives, stumble onto something that is unexplainable. The hunt for answers quickly consumes them, as strange coincidences pile up, leading them down a twisted path of skewed logic, paranoia, manipulations, and bitter recriminations, a path that, in the end, only leads them to more questions. It’s a depiction of the off-kilter world that is a reality for so many people these days, a recipe for disaster that we see happening all over the country now.

Soaked in that particular drain culvert feel of lower LA, with its warren of sloping dirty streets of sun-baked concrete, and that brittle blue sky above, Something in the Dirt is very much a movie about living in LA, but down in the fetid swamplands where the magic has curdled and died, the reality of that siren call of fortune and fame laid bare in that broiling urban desert where the hoi polloi endlessly chase the dream, toiling away beneath the long shadows cast by the city’s great glittering towers of the wealthy, the beautiful, the famous, and the powerful, all rising in the distance and gleaming in the sun.

Something in the Dirt is a film about the way that people need to have meaning in their lives, something to fill a hole within themselves, and how so many seek out that meaning externally, in accomplishments, in consumption and acquisition, or in their connections to others. It’s about the lengths people will go to, when external sources ultimately prove unsatisfying, to create meaning out of whatever is available. This is a film about how people will see what they want to see when they look for patterns, how they will use those pattens to make stories, and how those stories provide them with the meaning they so deeply crave, all while making it clear that, as the author of the stories, they can only say exactly what we want them to say.

Also, it’s a film about how there’s shit out there that is just unexplainable.

I’m a big fan of Moorhead and Benson and their particular brand of heady DIY-feeling genre flicks. They muck about with huge weird concepts in interesting ways, but in small settings, and I love that. If you liked Spring, The Endless, or Synchronic, then you’ll definitely like Something in the Dirt too.

Big thumbs up.