Something in the Dirt is by the same pair of nerds who brought us the cryptic The Endless and the somewhat-less-cryptic Synchronic. It’s another lo-fi sci-fi from this pair of knuckleheads designed to make you ponder reality while probably not making any sense to anyone except themselves.
The flick is about a pair of average guys living in a low-rent apartment in LA who discover a supernatural something is going on in one of their apartments. So they set up camera to capture it on film and turn it into a documentary. What follows is a lot of paranoid, existential ramblings by people just smart enough to be stupid or high enough to be profound.
I was drawn into this blurry, surreal film with its disregard for logic and typical storytelling. I was constantly amused and bemused by the random metaphysical prattle of a couple of guys who saw this YouTube video once or maybe remember reading a book when they were kids. They make wild deductive links between random events and draw lines on a mental map based on the binary sequence of fruit seeds. They demonstrate the very human trait of forming patterns where none exist… or maybe they’ve peeked behind the veil of reality and are really seeing the golden ratio everywhere they go…
I was mostly amused because this film is about a pair of pseudointellectual idiots. But that’s also my desperate hope because it’s possible the screenwriter/directors themselves might be the pseudointellectual idiots. The fact is, I’m not sure and the movie is either clever enough to conceal it, or dumb enough not to realize they were high on their own supply.
Plus, hell, it’s almost two hours long and you slowly start to realize that maybe nothing is going to be resolved or explained by the end. Maybe rewatching and connecting the patterns Charlie Day style will make the film profound… or maybe you’ll just do that and fall into the same connect-the-dots mentality as the characters.
So, yeah, I certainly enjoyed the experience of watching this film, I’m just not so sure any of it hangs together. I really wish that I came away thinking I’d seen something actually profound as opposed to a clever trick… or great big pile of celluloid hubris.
Score: 78