Back in the early thousands, the American independent film movement became stricken with an illness that can only be described as mumblecore-itis. Thanks to the relative breakout success of cinematic slurrers like Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes The Stairs), Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation) and arch straight white dude Noah Baumbach (The Squid And The Whale, Frances Ha) the once promising Stateside genre movement was squashed under the weight of ultra-low budget films about arrogant New Yorkers, their therapists and their boring, vapid lives.
However, if mumblecore is a disease, then Peter Vack’s sometimes agonisingly filthy Assholes is the antidote. Sure, it’s an ultra-low budget film about a pair of arrogant Americans (expertly played by Jack Dunphy and Betsey Brown), their therapists and their boring, vapid lives, and sure, it might feature long bouts of cheerfully mundane, back and forth dialogue, but it doesn’t so much mock its genre forefathers as it does tear them apart from the inside.
Assholes not only features a rogue’s gallery of filthy, hard-to-love perverts, it’s also bursting at the seams with a not-to-be-sniffed at catalogue of literal human assholes.
So, consider this a warning for those amongst you who are easily upset – that title is a pun of the most debased and offensive variety. Assholes not only features a rogue’s gallery of filthy, hard-to-love perverts, it’s also bursting at the seams with a not-to-be-sniffed at catalogue of literal human assholes which, over the course of the film’s 74 shit-stained minutes, get variously rubbed, licked, wiped and stretched.
In that way, it owes as much to Harmony Korine, the lord of the trash humpers himself, as it does a wet blanket like Baumbach – one particular sequence involves Dunphy and Brown crashing their chemically-addled way through a bunch of Times Square shops to the quiet disbelief of New Yorkers who may or may not be in on the joke, a shaky nod to Korine’s Gummo.
There is only so much that one can take, of course, and Vack knows that – hence why his film runs as short as it does. One can imagine that many more shots of anal cunnilingus, face fulls of human shit or shrieking ass goblins (it’s hard to explain) would leave most audiences trembling in a heap on the floor.
Instead, as it is, Assholes is a minor triumph of horror and disgust, not to mention a long, wet fart let rip in the all-too serious museum that American independent cinema has become. Long live the new mumblecore.
Assholes was reviewed as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival 2017. For more details on the fest, head here.
