Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead specialize in making movies that squander a fantastic—in both senses of that adjective—sci-fi premise. They don’t actually set out to squander anything, I’m quite confident, and certainly there are many rabid Benson & Moorhead fans who’ll disagree (and perhaps even some who don’t mentally mistake “Benson & Moorhead” for a tony cigarette brand). I want to be up front, though: Something in the Dirt is the fourth of their features that I’ve seen, following Spring (2014), The Endless (2017), and Synchronic (2019), and the fourth that saw me start out highly intrigued and wind up deeply frustrated. To an extent, that’s by design, since these guys employ weird-ass scenarios primarily as a means to explore mundane personal relationships; getting hung up on whether everything “makes sense,” or even just resolves in a satisfying way, invariably means that you’ve willfully missed the point. Trouble is, the sci-fi trappings always prove far more arresting than do the characters who get trapped within them. And that tends to be especially true when Benson (co-director, co-editor, screenwriter) and Moorhead (co-director, co-editor, cinematographer) also play the lead roles, as they do here. Though The Endless, in which they’re likewise the two main actors, is nonetheless my favorite of their films to date, simply because it’s so damn chilling at times.


Something in the Dirt, on the other hand, isn’t so much chilling as it’s just…increasingly odd. The first anomaly occurs not long after Levi (Benson), an ex-con and registered sex offender who swears that he merely took a leak outside of a pandemic-closed day-care center, moves into one of L.A.’s rattier apartment complexes, where he quickly meets new neighbor John (Moorhead), who quickly explains that the huge, creepy red stain on his white dress shirt is someone’s spilled “blood martini,” not actual blood. John also reveals that Levi’s apartment had been unoccupied for more than a decade, which may or may not help to explain why some of its walls and doorframes are covered in what appear to be mathematical equations. Opening one particular closet door, it turns out, causes a large crystal object, which Levi had found left in the apartment and begun using as an ashtray, to levitate and cast a mysterious triangle-nautilus light show on the adjacent wall. Having noticed this same symbol around the city of late, John, who works part-time as a wedding photographer, proposes shooting a documentary about the phenomenon (initially sporting the working title Something in the Light), with the hope of maybe selling it to Netflix for a kajillion dollars.


“This film is dedicated to MAKING MOVIES WITH YOUR FRIENDS,” proclaim Something in the Dirt’s end credits, and the film positively exults in that freewheeling no-budget vibe. Like so many indie movies shot during the pandemic, it’s largely confined to a single set (Benson actually lives in Levi’s apartment; Moorhead genuinely does live below him in that same complex), and you can almost feel the enthusiastic brainstorming that sought to fashion some kind of story from the elements at hand. Can we do something with this door? What about that window? Hey, you know your big dumb ashtray? Conventional dramatic scenes are studded with quick inserts that are often just goofy jokes: Trying to remember the name of the Rosicrucians, Levi refers to them as the Rose Croutons, and the guys cut in isolated shots of a single rose in a vase and a large bowl of croutons. It’s the sort of why-not? flourish that can become irresistible when fun and boredom are your primary motivators. I’d be willing to wager that some of Levi and John’s arguments about what direction to take their doc, and even regarding what its title ought to be, reflect conflicts that Benson and Moorhead have themselves experienced, exaggerated here for comic effect. There’s even a mock-doc framework of sorts, though it’s sparingly employed and never amounts to much more than vague hints of disaster to come.


As ever, it’s the balance between genre and character that goes awry. Benson and Moorhead are both decent actors, in the basic sense of not coming across as stiff or overly emphatic, and they share an easy chemistry that’s clearly borne of their longtime friendship and working partnership. But neither one has the degree of natural charisma that makes someone inherently watchable, and Benson’s script fails to construct a solid dramatic core that might render that X factor unnecessary. Something in the Dirt isn’t terribly subtle about what it’s doing—the film’s key scene finds literally every single object in Levi’s apartment levitating, which John and Levi barely even register because they’re too busy shouting accusations and recriminations at each other. It’s an amusing moment, but would only truly land as the culmination of a slow, steady emotional build, and that’s just not in evidence. At best, these guys come across as a couple of blinkered doofuses who’ve been hanging out together for artificial reasons, and “We’re only friends because we’re ostensibly making this movie together” doesn’t pack all that much of a punch, even in stark, demoralizing contrast to Dirt’s palpable atmosphere of joyful collaboration happening behind the camera.


Somewhat more potent, but considerably less coherent, is the degree to which Levi and John’s obsession with signs and portents starts to look downright deranged. That’s a superb subject for our conspiracy-addled age, and David Robert Mitchell went absolutely nuts with it in Under the Silver Lake a few years ago, stuffing his movie with coded clues that serve only to emphasize how fundamentally pointless it can be when amateur detective work becomes your sole access point first to art and entertainment, then to the world in general. Something in the Dirt seems to have something similar in mind, but it’s very difficult to judge Levi and John for becoming fixated on events that are objectively paranormal. There are various allusions to “re-creations” in the mock-doc interviews, so maybe we’re meant to conclude that none of that stuff was real—that they exaggerated or even invented it in order to make their documentary more enticing. But that theory requires these two dudes to be the visual-FX whizzes that Benson and Moorhead (mostly Moorhead) are in real life, capable of pulling off amazing illusions with next to no money. And the fact that their most vicious argument takes place concurrently with what would be the trickiest setpiece suggests that even John and Levi’s “relationship” is sensationalized bullshit, in which case who cares about any of this?


Ultimately, Something in the Dirt looks and plays far too much like what it is: A movie concocted by two filmmaking buddies who were mostly trapped in their joint apartment building for months and decided to make the best of that creatively. I’d blame the pandemic, except that previous Benson & Moorhead joints, largely unfettered in their mobility (if not in their finances), suffer from more or less the same structural defects. These guys are unquestionably talented, and their instincts are sound—they just need to come up with a clever idea that either legitimately functions as a feature-length narrative or dovetails more persuasively with the character drama for which it merely serves as a hook. And if they ever manage to pull off both at once, look out.


One of the first notable online film critics, having launched his site The Man Who Viewed Too Much in 1995, Mike D’Angelo has also written professionally for Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Esquire, Las Vegas Weekly, and The A.V. Club, among other publications. He’s been a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and currently blathers opinions almost daily on Patreon.