The Scary of Sixty-First: A Jeffrey Epstein Horror Film? Ho-hum
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
Liam Lacey
Gruesome media stories have a habit of taking up residence in our heads. This is the central conceit of The Scary of Sixty-First, a sexual-political horror-comedy inspired by the Jeffrey Epstein story.
The film, which won the Best First Feature prize at the Berlin Film Festival last February, is directed by 30-year-old first-time director and co-writer Dasha Nekrasova, an actor who plays the crisis publicist Comfry on the most recent season of Succession, HBO’s satire of psychopathic capitalism.
She is also the co-host of the Red Scare podcast where she, and fellow Soviet-born co-host Anna Khachiyan, discuss political, cultural trends from an irreverent leftist perspective, with lots of vocal fry and personal anecdotes.
Red Scare and The Scary of Sixty-First have a pronounced ideological connection. The Epstein case represents an area where the so-called “dirtbag left,” led by ironically offensive Gen-X podcasters, and the whacko pro-Trump right, share common ground. Paralleling QAnon’s fantasies about a pedophile-cannibal cult of powerful corporate and political figures, Jeffrey Epstein really did have a trafficking ring for enslaving adolescent girls, while maintained long-term relationships with powerful men, including Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, Duke of York.
Though the medical examiner ruled Epstein’s 2019 jailhouse death a suicide, there have been many conspiracy theories from both left and right, speculating on which powerful people wanted him dead.
That makes The Scary a movie that mirrors, and is entangled in, this current sleazy paranoid historical moment. The story begins as two college friends, Noelle (co-writer Madeline Quinn) and aspiring actress Addie (Betsey Brown), find an improbably affordable fully furnished duplex apartment on East 61st Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
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There are a few oddities: Mirrors on the ceiling and inside doors that lock from the outside. But apart from the rotting ham in the fridge, the scratch marks inside the closet and a bloody stain on a mattress, it’s a steal.
Shortly after they move in, a stranger (Nekrasova) identified only as The Girl appears.
She explains to Nicole that she’s investigating Epstein’s mysterious death and that the Nicole and Addie are living in one of Epstein’s properties, where he probably kept adolescent girls as slaves. The two women bond — first over internet conspiracy theories, then drugs, and later, sexually — which might seem a strange thing to do in the midst of a sex crime investigation.
The internalization of sexual trauma is even more pronounced with Addie, who, while knowing nothing of the investigation, becomes possessed, presumably by the spirit of one of the girls who were Epstein’s victims. During sex with her boyfriend (Mark H. Rapaport, a producer of the film), she wants to age regresses in a little girl voice at which point he stops in disgust.
From there, Addie’s condition gets worse. Iin a series of solo scenes which play like one-woman performance art, Addie sucks her thumb and masturbates to a shrine of pictures of Prince Andrew, while squelching about in piles of rotten fruit on the floor. Her descent is the bad taste highlight of the film, signifying internalized patriarchal oppression taken to an extreme. (The low-point bad taste is the characters’ pointless use of sexual slurs).
The other stuff, the filmmaking part, is calculated but badly executed. The plot is haphazard and, even at 81 minutes, feels padded. Hunter Zimny’s hazy 16mm cinematography mimics Roman Polanski’s trio of apartment thrillers (Repulsion, The Tenant, Rosemary’s Baby) while Eli Keszler’s throbbing electronic score evokes the work of the ‘70s’ thrillers of Dario Argento. But the whole package wobbles between slapdash homage and sophomoric parody.
Dasha Nekrasova’s bored gamine onscreen presence is quite funny (she suggests a jaded Emma Watson). But much of the acting here is atrocious and the slash-and-splatter ending disappointingly conventional.
When the moment finally comes to make a tasty meal of the rich, the recipe will need to be planned more carefully than this.
CLICK HERE to watch Bonnie Laufer’s interview with writer-director co-star Dasha Nekrasova.
The Scary of Sixty-First. Directed by Dasha Nekrasova. Written by Dasha Nekrasova and Madeline Quinn. Starring; Dasha Nekrasova, Madeline Quinn, Betsey Brown, Mark Rapaport, Stephen Gurewitz and Jason Grisell. Released digitally on VOD Friday, Dec. 17.