By David Dent
The democratisation of the podcast process, enabling anyone with access to a laptop, software, a microphone and an idea with which to set themselves up, has undoubtedly contributed to the watchability of fledgling director Matt Vesely’s decidedly undramatic first feature.
Following a court case which has found against her, an unnamed journalist (credited as ‘the interviewer’ and played by Lily Sullivan) has decamped to her parents’ swish brutalist country bungalow to avoid post defamation trial pestering by the media, and to try and rebuild her career.
She is now a member of a click bait podcast called ‘Beyond Believable’ but her ignominious escape from media attention has not prevented a stream of online abuse. Struggling for ideas to deliver to her exasperated producer, amidst the threatening and plain weird emails in her inbox, Sullivan’s character comes across one headed ‘The Truth Will out’ containing only the words ‘Floramae King + brick’ accompanying a phone number.
The email sets off an investigative trail that becomes the source of her latest podcast submission, starting with Ms King’s twenty year old story of a nanny to a wealthy family, in possession of a mysterious and potentially valuable brick, whose daughter is implicated in a startling incident of home vandalism following which the brick is taken by the head of the household in part payment for the damage.
Her first episode is a viral success, triggering lots of respondents who have their own stories about receiving similar bricks, and what the objects may contain and/or mean. Convinced of the truth of these accounts, the interviewer delves deeper into the story, while at the same time mentally unravelling. Until one day a knock at the door delivers a mysterious package which ties one of her own childhood recollections directly back into the story she is researching.
The idea of taking an out there idea and humanising it by having the story accounted for by various voices may put the viewer in mind of the films of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, but Vesely makes even their slim productions feel like big budget outings against his set up; just one woman, one room in a large house and the equipment needed to record and edit a podcast. The rest is in the dialogue, from the disembodied interviewed voices that offer angles on the mystery, to the technical edits on those voices which bring the interviewer’s ideas together. This is a film as much about listening as telling, and if the final scenes, opening the film out to a slightly more external focus, don’t quite come together, the whole film feels like an enigma that’s as much fun to experience as it is to try and work out.
Monolith screens as part of Frightfest 2023.
Bloody Flicks 