Sundance Review: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s ‘Something In The Dirt’

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The film had its premiere in the U.S. Dramatic Competition lineup at the Sundance Film Festival.The authors of this trippy tale have categorically denied that they were influenced by the QAnon movement when they were writing, directing, or perhaps just channeling the twisting, turning phantasmagoria that is the sometimes maddeningly ambiguous Something in the Dirt.From anyone else, this might seem disingenuous.

But Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have some form in the conspiracy department—notably their cryptic 2017 sci-fi drama, The Endless, in which two escapees from a UFO suicide cult return to the fold in an attempt to find closure.

A hell of a lot cheaper, and filmed without interference during the playground of solitude that was the lockdown, Something In The Dirt is something of a reset for the directing duo, a palate cleanser after the needlessly convoluted Synchronic and a return to what it is they do best: garage punk sci-fi of the kind not much seen since Alex Cox’s Repo Man in 1984.As with The Endless, the directors also play the leads, with Benson as Levi Danube, a bartender with a shady past who has just stumbled upon a bargain no-strings apartment next to John Daniels (Moorhead), a photographer who has just split from his husband.

The two guys hit it off, and during a lazy afternoon’s banter they are astonished to see strange lights flooding the property and anti-gravitational activity causing an ashtray, itself a strange crystal that just seems to have appeared from nowhere, to rise up and hover in the air.