From the first moments of The Scary of Sixty-First, I was thinking about Sofia Coppola. Not the films she directed, but her infamously bad performance in The Godfather Part III (1990). What was she doing in that role, exactly? Was it bad acting, or simply not acting, just behaviour and recitation caught on film? Is the desire for a good performance a bourgeois one, a desire built out of a need for things to be pleasing and to meet our expectations? Watching The Scary, my brain was working overtime as I tried to figure out why everyone in it is so lifeless, except when they’re caught up in some kind of sexual mania. Was this intentional? Why are the characters making the choices they are making? Why, for an 80-minute film, does there seem to be so much filler? Is it brilliant or bad?
The Scary of Sixty-First is the directorial debut of Dasha Nekrasova, one half of the podcast Red Scare and a New York scenester circulating in the media/downtown-vibing milieu, whose concerns are apparently the same as many young, upper middle class types in New York: real estate and leftist politics. Two young women, Addie (Betsy Brown) and Noelle (Madeline Quinn), find a suspiciously inexpensive apartment in Manhattan, still filled with the belongings of previous tenants. After they move in they must deal with leftover items like a baby grand piano, a rotting ham and a blood stained mattress. With the introduction of a character credited only as The Girl (played by Nekrasova), a conspiracy theory hobbyist who has become obsessed with the murder of Jeffrey Epstein and his private network of sex trafficking and powerful friends, they learn their apartment was once an Epstein property. He didn’t live there, but he kept girls there. This explains the claw marks in the closet. Soon Noelle becomes fixated on The Girl, and they read articles and watch YouTube videos and spout theories about the Epstein network while doing speed and fucking. Meanwhile, Addie seems to become possessed either by the spirit of a teenage girl raped and sacrificed by an Epstein colleague or by some sort of demon summoned by the dark energy of the goings-on in the apartment. She jerks off a lot, tries to role play statutory rape with a horrified boyfriend, and works herself into a sexual frenzy over Epstein and his co-conspirator Prince Andrew. These two different obsessions separate the two friends, as each falls down into their own dark spiral.
The Scary is an effective little film, although this is mostly because it relies heavily on narrative structures established by filmmakers like Roman Polanski. A chance encounter leads a young woman into a world of increasing darkness until it overwhelms her and people start to die. She will be disbelieved by others, she will be denied assistance, she will doubt her own sanity, and she will be forced to take violent action to save herself. It’s creepy, it’s mostly pretty to look at, and it hits the beats the genre established long ago. Nekrasova’s debut film doesn’t stray far from the form, and – like a lot of first films – it wears its references right on the surface. There’s a bit of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), a hint of Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981), some Dario Argento, some Traci Lords softporn, and what looks like a montage from a Fiona Apple video from the 90s. This is occasionally disruptive, as you get caught up in chasing the influences. Where have I seen someone smearing around their sexual fluids before? In The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005). Why does this seem familiar? Because it’s a lot like early Greta Gerwig mumblecore.
Nekrasova and her co-writer Quinn nevertheless update the themes to encompass more recent concerns, such as how a network of sexual criminals was allowed to operate with impunity throughout all levels of government, business, finance, and society. The Girl and Noelle retrace Epstein’s steps through Manhattan as they speculate about what they see as his murder and the subsequent coverup. Their theories are a blend of what are probably just facts – his island, the impossibility of his death being a suicide – and various conspiracy theories. At times these are interwoven with socialist revolutionary fantasies in a way that really works and so it’s a shame these moments disappear so quickly. One minute a character is rambling about Epstein, the next she is insisting that socialism is the only plausible system of government. Both these beliefs in the conspiracy and ‘radical’ politics operate in similar ways. The believers get to feel they know the truth: they are not duped like the people who think Epstein killed himself or that Hillary Clinton is a nice person or whatever. They see what’s ‘really’ going on, but because of the all-powerful systems working against them nothing can actually be done about it. If the world is fucked, then our characters are relieved of any personal responsibility, and in that case why not go sexually experiment and do some drugs?
Hidden among the discarded belongings in the apartment are two tarot cards, a Ten of Swords and The Sun. This is apt. All of The Scary’s primary characters, who are very thin and white, look pretty much like the most popular TikTok witches and astrologers in our cursed real world: women who look to the stars to tell them why they’re not rich and famous right now like their parents told them they would be, or who look to spellcraft to help them achieve their elusive goals. When the Harvard degree doesn’t get you what you want, try menstrual fluid mixed with wormwood. Occult practice (as well as radical politics) tends to become fashionable during times of great uncertainty, and our age of mass death and exploitation is definitely that. It’s a way of making meaning out of our sense of powerlessness, as well as giving us the illusion of control. There’s an attempt to integrate some of this into the film’s storyline, but it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s as if its creators thought that by trying to google the meaning of a tarot card, or by trying to act or write a coherent story, they’d be betraying their disaffected stances. The performances are awkward and stilted. Nothing makes much of an impact. In a shot near the end one of the women runs away from a scene of blood and violence, flapping her arms uselessly while covered in gore. The scene reminds me of many such final scenes of girls in horror cinema, but as with so much in The Scary I’m not sure what they’re going for. It’s not exaggerated enough to make it a satire, not ‘running’ enough to make it camp, not tormented enough to create genuine tension, and not accurate enough to make it homage. Instead this moment hovers in the middle of all of these things, unsure of what it’s going for and afraid to commit itself in any direction. It’s not scary and it’s not funny; it’s just a thing that is happening on the screen.
The primary influence of The Scary really seems to be pornography. The interiors of the apartment have the same sterility and faux-classiness as the living room settings of various gangbangs on PornHub. Before Noelle kisses The Girl, she utters a line that could be copied from a thousand girl-on-girl videos: “I have never done this with a girl before.” It wouldn’t surprise me if everyone working on Scary has seen just as much porn as film, given how easily the two worlds blend into one another here. Maybe this is why only the sex scenes of Scary bring any real commitment from the performers: when Noelle’s obsession with The Girl becomes sexual, a pretty good attempt is at least made to get Noelle off. Likewise, the erotic impulses of the young women in the film, who get inappropriately turned on by reading these stories of rape and imprisonment but take this desire to one another (the one sex scene involving a man is predictably flat and pathetic), are the only part of the film that truly feels fresh. At times their desire seems more like a shared understanding of what makes the world bad, a sense of a conspiratorial partnership, as these young women try to live in a world that is ultimately built on systems built to oppress and abuse them, whether that be the grandiose (Epstein’s private island) or the mundane (choking, etc). That they confusedly hunt for pleasure in this violence is not surprising, and it is a relief that no one tries to offer a moral lesson or pathologise their behaviour, even if the film does end in the traditional slasher way. It’s significant, too, that Addie’s sexual manias revolve around these fantasies and stories of women raped and abused by members of the royal family. But ultimately a woman masturbating to the idea of getting raped by a prince truly is the princess story this generation deserves. It turns out trying to fetishise your own powerlessness plays into the hands of the bad guys. Who could have guessed?
It’s difficult to separate The Scary from Red Scare, even if only because of its deliberately provocative language. The writers of The Scary litter the dialogue with various slurs, the use of which both Nekrasova and her co-host Anna Khachiyan defend on Red Scare as a form of protest against the overly woke politically correct left. They carry themselves with a Fuck Your Feelings attitude both inside and outside the show, making merch with ISIS symbols and a game out of other people’s difficulties coping with cruelty. (Khachiyan herself has a short and silent cameo as Ghislaine Maxwell, or just a lookalike who drives the characters into paranoia when she pops up, and she is possibly the best thing in the film. Finally, I thought, someone with real presence!) But in The Scary this language often feels forced: hearing Nekrasova call someone a “faggot” is more child-in-playground than devil-may-care bitch of the world. It’s almost as if it is there as a ward against criticism – they can’t handle how edgy we are, we’re too dangerous for traditional distribution, and so on. But calling a pudgy white guy a “cuck” isn’t really the edgy joke they seem to think it is, given that the FX sitcom You’re the Worst did half a season around this five years ago. It’s hard to rely on transgression to supply your work with weight when we exist in a society where everything is permitted. Every sex act has already been performed by your average nice suburban Midwestern couple, each swear word and offensive slur has been condemned and reclaimed and condemned and reclaimed again, and your average influencer has a darker imagination than The Scary. Being an edgelord just becomes another thing they can’t quite commit to.
In the end, what Scary reminds me of most is last year’s Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell). This film also focuses on a rich and pretty blonde contemplating rape culture, and it suffers in a similar way from not knowing what kind of movie it wants to be. Both films favour spectator over victim. In Promising Young Woman we barely get a description of the girl whose rape sets off the action of the film, while in The Scary the Epstein victims are all phantoms, invisible and imagined. For the most part the primary characters are not vulnerable to male violence, but simply witness to it. None of the women of The Scary would be Jeffrey Epstein’s victims because, unlike the women brought into Epstein’s circle, all of them seem to have money. This distance allows them to eroticise the victimisation and the violation, to be fascinated by all its imagined sexual horrors, to role play and get off on someone else’s suffering. Does the world really need a film about people so cool they can’t even be bothered to enunciate? We can only hope that whatever Nekrasova decides to do next, she does it with something other than a bored smirk.
Jessa Crispin is the author of The Dead Ladies Project and Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto. She currently lives in Baltimore.