Muck
2016 · 10m · USA
Directed by Bruce Smolanoff
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, darkly comic, melancholic
Mel Vitale, an aspiring stand-up too caustic for mainstream rooms, is unraveling between a hoarder mother, an absent father, and a self-destructive streak with the gas pedal mashed. The descent toward rock bottom is the plot.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Tallie Medel plus Sean Price Williams on a film about a comic too mean to make it. That trio of facts is a green light.
Tallie Medel playing a comedian genuinely not okay, with Sean Price Williams shooting squalor like Rembrandt — that's already the pitch. Smolanoff trusts both his lead and his DP to do the work; this is the kind of bleak interior I'd champion.
Tallie Medel doing a comedian who's genuinely not okay, Sean Price Williams on camera shooting the hoarder mom's apartment like a Rembrandt — that's a craft pairing that deserves attention. The 'too dark for the comic's comic's comics' calibration is hard to nail, and this cast seems built for it.
Reviews
MUCK evokes the kind of self-loathing that bubbles up of its own accord; it's hard to contain, impossible to expunge, fated to stain and foul everything around it.