Three Short Films By Curry Barker: Between Life And Death

Last month, I watched a short film called Milk & Serial, and it was good enough to get me rethinking my general dismissiveness toward YouTube as a source of original horror filmmaking. It was a sharp, vicious little piece of found-footage horror featuring some surprisingly strong performances, and it looks like a lot of it was the work of a young man named Curry Barker, who wrote, directed, edited, and co-starred in it. My interest was piqued, and since watching it I’d been meaning to check out some of his other work. He does sketch comedy, but he’s made a few other short films as well, so I thought I’d take a look at three of them this week. Some of them are stronger than others, but I’m impressed with what I’ve seen.

There are a few elements that tie these three films - Enigma, Warnings, and The Chair - together. They’re all about the space between life and death, and a vein of deadpan absurdity runs through all of them to one degree or another, as all three feature protagonists who are having difficulty grappling with some element of adult life. Whether it’s responsibility, or the need for human contact, or the need to be fully present in a relationship, all of these films have at their center men whose world is unraveling around them, and who faces their circumstances with varying levels of exasperation. They’re less terrified and more puzzled and annoyed, but not to a degree that’s overtly comic. There are definite moments of wry black humor, but I don’t know that I’d call any of these comedies. These are ordinary people in extraordinary situations, and none of them are what you’d call heroic.

They’re all small productions, and two of them are very much just Barker and some of his regular collaborators shooting in one or two locations, but there’s a real sense of restraint and a willingness to build tension through small moments, carefully composed shots and impressionistic editing. There’s a refreshing lack of jump-scares or the usual premises, and it’s clear that Barker knows if you set things up correctly, then even a little detail - like a note, or a blurry figure in the background - can go a long way toward setting the mood.

Enigma

This film opens on squalor. A young man is kneeled over his toilet, vomiting, while empty bottles, fast-food wrappers, and other garbage lies scattered all over the place. This is Adam, and he’s having trouble being a functional adult. He doesn’t leave his apartment unless he has to, orders food in a lot, and is falling out of touch with his friends and family. He has regrets, he wonders where his life went wrong, and all the while he’s scrolling through his phone, looking at all of his friends on social media as they party and figure out how they’re going to kill themselves before the world ends, in slightly less than a week.

This is a melancholy story, told from the point of view of a sad guy for whom even the end of the world isn’t enough motivation to get out and live. Adam sort of wanders through the last days on Earth, making excuses for why he can’t go out, remaining a prisoner of his own self-doubt and guilt. It strikes a good balance between the enormity of what’s coming (a countdown to the end is cleverly inserted as bits of background scenery) and the way life goes on regardless – people keep delivering pizzas, people keep working behind a register, while others get out and make the best of what’s left. Some think it’s more of the same catastrophizing that’s been with us for decades, some think it’s a hoax to cull the population and make purveyors of assisted suicide rich, others are just vibing, whatever comes will come. As is often the case with stories like these, the end of the world is an opportunity to examine how we live and the importance of human connection. So in that sense there isn’t anything really all that unusual here, and it’s the least scary of the three, but there are nice moments of deadpan humor alongside pathos that serve the story well and keep us empathetic. I wouldn’t call it a black comedy…more of a dark gray comedy?

Warnings

It’s a late night at the end of what was probably a pretty wild Halloween party, and Sean’s walking out to his car, discussing how he almost got hit in the street by another car. When he reaches his car, he notices a note stuck to the window above the driver’s side door handle…

“I am begging you to stop.”

Needless to say, Sean gets freaked out and tries to ask his friends Kendal and Regan what’s happening, but they have no idea what he’s talking about. He’s a little confused, a little disoriented, and when he goes back out to his car, he finds another note, this time on the inside of his car. And he’s starting to hear voices.

This one is a creepy little psychological horror film centering on Sean’s attempts to understand what’s going on as the world around him gets stranger and stranger. It does a lot with very little, relying on the conceit of the notes and the way that everything becomes increasingly more disjointed the more Seans tries to understand what’s happening.  There’s nicely paced uneasiness throughout, combined with little bits of visual wit that creates this nicely discordant note – it’s funny and strange at the same time, and the aftertaste from the strange lingers a little longer than the funny does. There are some nightmare sequences (or are they?) that give everything a little bite as well, and the filmmakers do a good job of keeping us guessing about where it’s all going. It’s maybe a little slight, but definitely falls in horror territory and has its share of unsettling moments.

The Chair

Reese is out running some errands - getting dinner and flowers for his girlfriend Julie to celebrate their six-month anniversary - when he notices a chair sitting on the sidewalk. It looks to be in good shape, so he decides to grab it and take it home with him. As soon as Julie sees it, she hates it. It doesn’t go with the rest of the décor. It’s creepy. It makes her nervous. It feels evil, and she wants Reese to get it out of the house. So, in a fit of pique, Reese stubbornly sits down in the chair…

..and the next thing he knows, he’s back on the street where he picked up the chair in the moments before he puts it in the car. And somehow an entire week has gone by.

This one is more ambitious than the other two, and also the most effective as a horror film. It’s a bigger production with a cast outside of the usual ensemble, shot in a wider aspect ratio than the others. It’s a disorienting story that starts off being about a diffusely creepy chair, but soon reveals itself as a story about the unreliability of memory and what it must be like when it starts to fail. Abrupt, fragmented editing keeps us as off-balance as the protagonist, and real events wind around hallucinatory reverie, offering a few different explanations for what’s going on, but to its credit, the film doesn’t commit to one explanation over the other. There’s a cohesive visual vocabulary, which suggests there is some underlying logic to what’s happening, but it’s ultimately elusive. We know enough to know something is going on, but not enough to see it clearly, which is a wonderfully unsettling feeling. There’s also some really nice use of composition alongside the editing, it’s probably the least humorous of the bunch, and even though the end sort of fell flat for me, it was an enjoyably uneasy experience and probably makes the clearest argument yet for Barker having the sort of filmmaking chops that you’d like to see get more of a budget and wider distribution.

I have to admit, as much as I know intellectually that filmmaking technology has gotten better and more affordable over time, it’s been tough for me to take the leap to recognizing that there’s some really good work being made by young (don’t say it) auteurs (oh dammit, you said it) on a platform that I’m used to thinking of as sort of a video junk drawer. The Philippou brothers made the move from YouTube to the big screen, and I think if there’s any justice in the world, filmmakers like Kane Parsons and Curry Barker will be next, because they’re sure as hell making stuff that’s fresher and scarier than yet another Conjuring sequel.

Enigma: IMDB | YouTube
Warnings: IMDB | YouTube
The Chair: IMDB | YouTube