A Grand Mockery

Collaborating for the first time, underground Australian visionaries Sam Dixon and Adam C. Briggs have joined forces to concoct a singularly nerve-jangling cinematic head trip, evoking their addled protagonist’s dingy, dead-end environs with the tactile immediacy and lustrous visual textures of Super 8 film stock. Dixon stars as Josie, a bedraggled Queensland cinema worker who, to the chagrin of his long-suffering girlfriend Nelly (Kate “Babyshakes” Dillon, lead singer of the Brisbane rock outfit Full Flower Moon), has a habit of drowning his ennui and alienation in endless mugs of red wine from a box. Slowly but surely, he begins to lose his grip on reality as he tries and fails to tolerate the repetitive, dehumanizing drudgery of his everyday life. Briggs and Dixon cannily deploy all of the DIY formal resources at their disposal, resulting in a magnificently lo-fi, phantasmagorical fever dream that renders Josie’s psychic disintegration palpable, even poetic: perception stutters and stalls, nightmare logic prevails, and feverish maybe-hallucinations give way to horrific bodily transformations, all brought to surreal life with a dazzling audiovisual lyricism that proudly bears the influence of Kafka, Lynch, and Buñuel. A Yellow Veil Pictures release.