Regardless of your opinion of Curry Barker, writer-director of the year thanks to the massive success of Obsessionyou can’t really blame him for abandoning his roots. He made himself known by directing short films for YouTube, first within the sketch-comedy duo “c’est une bad idee” (with Obsession co-star Cooper Tomlinson) and later turned his attention to the horror genre. Now after Obsession earned more than half a billion dollars worldwide on a budget of $750,000, Barker has a prime spot for his next film’s debut this summer Everything but ghostsand proposes to create at least two additional features for A24 and Universal. He won’t need to make another short film on YouTube for a long time.
But he did it anyway! Just before Halloween, Barker surprise-released a new short film called “Mama Bear,” which he had filmed a few weeks earlier. So technically this is the sequel to next year’s horror comedy. Everything but ghostsfilming of which had already finished when Obsession was released in theaters last May. But by going beyond this theatrical release, “Mama Bear” became its de facto sequel to Obsession. It’s sort of a digital version of how Quentin Tarantino followed the success of pulp Fiction. He wrote and directed a segment of the anthology film Four bedrooms; he wrote and performed, but did not direct, From dusk to dawn; he directed an episode of the hit television series emergencywhich he did not write. He did all this before his next feature film, Jackie Browncame out in 1997, and it probably helped dispel some of the expectations about what it would tackle next.
“Mama Bear” certainly does that to Everything but ghosts (which, for what it’s worth, Seth Rogen saw and said is awesome). It’s not necessarily fair to judge a five-minute short film made as quickly as possible for a big-name director, and it’s certainly cool that Barker hasn’t neglected the platform or audience that first made him known. But for something touted as “coming from the mind of Curry Barker” – yes, the film uses trailer language in its credits – it’s surprisingly thin, even impersonal.
Certainly, it’s difficult for a five-minute short to feel intensely personal without flirting with self-parody or self-indulgence. And there are a few visual touchstones of Barker’s mainstream breakthrough present in “Mama Bear”: dim, shadowy lighting; sound design that hides crucial information in the narrowness of a phone call; a menacing figure standing in the corner of a room. But it feels more like a trailer for a single scene than a narrative, with a disoriented young man receiving a frantic phone call from his friend, warning him that someone called Lacy is coming from him; noticing a dark figure in the room with him; and faced with a hysterical Lacy moments later. This is the seed of a doppelganger story, but that seed is stuck in the question “what if there was a doppelganger?” It’s not really a film, even in short format. This is a potentially interesting argument.
Most likely, Barker did this more for fun than anything else, and if it has greater use in his career, it could be a proof of concept for something he hopes to achieve in a feature film, where he would be fleshed out. And if that doesn’t happen, obviously it doesn’t matter. But watching his first amateur feature film, Milk and seriesfollowed by the most refined Obsessionfollowed by this short shrug, is a real roller coaster. Obsession isn’t a perfect film, but in its pre-horror setting it manages to feel relatively lived-in, with characters who resemble people you might know. That’s not really the case with what little we know about “Mama Bear,” which is more confusing than evocative, right down to its unexplained title. Maybe it’s the actors; In ObsessionThe now-famous Inde Navarrette gives a bravura performance, but in “Mama Bear” the main players only get to scream and swear in panic. It’s like a spin-off based entirely on Navarrette’s viral “no, no, NO, NO” moment. Then again, actors can’t always transcend their material in the space of just a few minutes.
This isn’t meant to drag Curry Barker on, and anyway, YouTube shorts are no longer a deal-breaker for a guy who just made one of the highest-grossing horror films of all time. ‘Mama Bear’ may not be as good as Tarantino’s Four bedrooms segment or any given snippet you might extract From dusk to dawn. In fact, that’s definitely not the case. But hey, at least it’s shorter than his Saturday evening live episode. In the meantime we can continue to wait in the shadows Everything but ghosts for a surer sign of how Barker’s career will pan out.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is a regular contributor to The AV Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts on www.alcoolsport.comAlso.
Gn entert
