Feature Film | Comedy-Drama | USA | English | 1h20m | Dir: Michael Tully | Scr: Michael Tully | Story: Robert Longstreet, Onur Tukel, Michael Tully | DP: Jeremy Saulnier | Prod: Brooke Bernard, Brent Stewart, & Ryan Zacarias | Mus: Michael Montes | Ed: Marc Vives | PD: Bart Mangrum | Cast: Robert Longstreet, Onur Tukel, Michael Tully, Jim Willingham, Rachel Korine, Mark Darby Robinson, John Maringouin
Coming across like a Wes Anderson flick remade by David Lynch’s hick cousin with a post-Mumblecore aesthetic, Michael Tully’s ambitious Dostoyevskian feature is nothing if not different. Tully himself plays Cornelius, a onetime sporting prodigy, who returns to his family home after an absence of eighteen years, where he is greeted by his paid-not-to-farm farmer brothers Ezra (Longstreet) and Amos (Tukel) and their farmhand (and quite possibly illegitimate brother) Wilbur (Willingham). In the absence of their deceased parents, the vaguely effeminate Ezra has become something of a mother figure, whilst Amos, bitten by the painting bug, spends all of his waking hours creating brilliantly ghastly images filled with blood, shit, demons, sportsmen, and depraved sexuality. Wilbur, meanwhile, who, despite appearing to live in an abandoned tractor tyre, manages to see the beauty in just about everything and plays a mean guitar, spends his time digging for buried treasures. Life on the farm continues relatively normally until a plumbing emergency brings the boys’ old football coach, now a plumber, Red "Rooster" Rippington (Robinson), with his young-enough-to-be-his-granddaughter other half (Korine), to their door – at which point, the reason for Cornelius’s long absence suddenly becomes painfully apparent, bringing about the manifestation of their collective id in the form of a wandering preacher (Maringouin) who comes to the farm looking for vengeance… erm, or something like that. Bonkers!
