A bad break-up leads to a full-blown breakdown and a near-death experience in Oliver Bernsen’s hallucinatory feature debut. Some are calling it a body-horror movie, a label it largely earns because of the director’s predilection for strange shots of unidentified gore and viscera that pop up throughout, but the oddly titled Bagworm is arguably more of a black comedy — that is, if you believe that the films of Rick Alverson, notably 2015’s Entertainment, are funnier than the Hangover trilogy (which is a niche point of view, to be sure).
Peter Falls stars as Carroll, an everyman whose fall from grace is pretty staggering considering that he doesn’t seem to have very far to fall in the first place. Indeed, the plot, as such, isn’t so much a narrative as a string of minor but incremental disasters that accrue after Carroll steps on a rusty nail in the back garden. His dating life hasn’t been a roaring success thus far, but from here things go even further downhill, notably with his cringeworthy attempts to make himself appear more worldly by faking selfies purportedly taken in other countries.
Likewise, it’s only a matter of time before he loses his weird job, working for an online company, run overseas, selling a gadget called a “Handmer” that appears to be a portable hammer (a big clue to the film’s absurdist sense of humor). But Carroll never uses his newfound free time to good use; he doomscrolls through YouTube and, in one especially bizarre vignette, watches a motorist throw trash out of his window and then follows him home to return it. Meanwhile, his house is in an almost cartoonish state of disrepair and falling down around him, while his attempts to upgrade his furniture leads him to buy a shabby armchair on Craigslist that was previously occupied by a comatose, and incontinent, old lady.
To return to the Hangover reference, the event that Bagworm is headed to — circling it like water down a drain rather than an arrow to a bullseye — is a friend’s bachelor party in Vegas. Carroll clearly doesn’t want to go, which is why it doesn’t automatically seem as though the film will ever get there, but somehow it does. By this time, as an infection from the rusty nail courses through his body, Carroll has become a physically repulsive wreck, an open sore, riddled with gunge and pus. And yet no one seems to see it, externalizing the film’s main theme: Carroll’s total mental disintegration in the wake of a painful break-up.
Though he certainly goes to some dark places, Carroll does eventual pull out of his tailspin, although the journey to get there will lose a lot of viewers along the way. Carroll, likewise, is not a terribly sympathetic figure, although once we meet his awful friends he starts to look a little more human, being the best of a very bad bunch. Playing the lead, Falls does a very good job of showing the tragedy of Carroll’s situation without ever playing the role for pity; the toxic world of the manosphere has seldom been so graphically or gruesomely rendered.
Title: Bagworm
Festival: SXSW (Visions)
Director: Oliver Bernsen
Screenwriter: Henry Bernsen
Cast: Peter Falls, Michelle Ortiz, Robbie Arnett, Corbin Bernsen, Stephen Borrello, Jessy Morner-Ritt, Sydney Winbush, Francesca Galassi
Running time: 1 hr 36 mins