Plague Cinema

Zach Schonfeld on film’s rejection—and embrace—of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Earlier this year, the filmmaker and musician Theda Hammel was working on a trailer for her debut feature, the pandemic-set queer satire Stress Positions. At one point, she tried to cut a version for the film—which stars John Early as a mid-divorce gay man quarantining with his nephew during the summer of 2020—without any visible masks.

“There was no way to make that trailer work,” Hammel says. “You couldn’t establish the premise at all. It just looks like a movie about nothing. A lot of very dramatic images in the film are ones with masks.”

Indeed, Stress Positions leans all the way into its lockdown-blues milieu. Its protagonist, Terry (played by Early), is a sentient panic attack as he greets a Grubhub delivery worker with an oversized gas mask, disinfects his groceries, and begs his Covid-denying neighbor to pull her mask up. The film captures the ambient chaos of early-pandemic life, as nonstop sirens blend into protest exhortations, and it satirizes the antisocial tendencies that were heightened by the crisis—which, “if treated comedically, can be very funny,” says Hammel, who wrote the film in early 2021 and co-stars as Terry’s best friend.

Hammel’s movie is part of a recent wave of compelling films set within Covid's grip, from emerging and non-mainstream filmmakers willing to defy Hollywood's reluctance to acknowledge the pandemic onscreen. That crop includes Bertrand Bonello's Coma, a dreamlike reverie of a teenage girl who follows an enigmatic YouTuber during lockdown, and Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, a mordantly funny dissection of labor, exploitation, and bawdy TikTok personas in the present era. (Jude, unafraid of making movies that feel bracingly contemporary, previously incorporated the pandemic into his raunchy social satire Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn.)

Article continues below

WELCOME TO TASTELAND

It’s taste’s world, we’re all just living in it…

That’s the premise of our new weekly podcast, Tasteland, co-hosted by Daisy Alioto (CEO of Dirt Media) and Francis Zierer, the editor of Creator Spotlight—a weekly newsletter about creators across the world of newsletters.

The podcast will drop weekly on Wednesdays, and periodically feature guests from the media, marketing and technology world. Want to be alerted every time a new episode drops? Click the button below to subscribe.

This week’s episode tackles local journalism, letting people enjoy things, and airport sushi…

The new canon also includes Family Portrait (available via Metrograph at Home), a haunting debut feature from American director Lucy Kerr. It centers around a family gathering unsettled by murmurs of a mysterious virus from which a cousin has just died—a fictionalized version of early 2020. While Stress Positions confronts lockdown paranoia head-on, Family Portrait is more oblique, marinating in the denial baked into our pandemic response from the beginning.

Kerr, who studied experimental film at California Institute of the Arts, notes how the film’s distortion of linear time reflects the early-pandemic feeling of time collapsing. But its larger themes—of denial, of people unwilling to acknowledge their grief—apply as much to this late stage of the pandemic, and reflect some of Kerr’s frustrations with her own family.

“A distant relative passed away from Covid and still my family was set on things going back to normal,” Kerr says. “There was mass death happening in New York, and all this denial of it actually being a virus. That inspired the script.”

“I knew marketing it as happening in Covid might not have the best effect because people don’t want to watch Covid movies,” Kerr adds. “But it’s also like, why is that? It’s because we’re all in this denial. We don’t wanna face it.”

DIRT ON FILM