What happens if you throw Eyes Wide Shut, QANon, mumblecore, Giallo, and Jeffrey Epstein into a blender and mix with a large dash of Gen-Z detachment? Unfortunately you get The Scary of Sixty-First, the debut film from Dasha Nekrasova, host of the Red Scare podcast and perhaps better known here as PR rep Comfry from Succession. A jumbled soup of conspiracy theory and bad taste comedy-horror, it gets some grudging points for both razor-sharp topicality and sheer audacity but fails in pretty much every other department.
Two young women, Addie (Betsey Brown) and Noelle (Madeline Quinn) move into a suspiciously cheap apartment in New York’s Upper East Side. One day, a unnamed woman (Nekrasova, billed only as “The Girl”) knocks on the door when Noelle is home alone and informs her the flat was formerly owned by Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, it may even have been used a space for the trafficking and abuse of some of the young girls he kept in sexual slavery. At the same time Addie begins to exhibit strange behaviour which may be possession by the spirit of a 13-year-old victim of Epstein’s. As Addie gets increasingly deranged, Noelle and the Girl vanish down a rabbit hole of amphetamine-fuelled conspiracy.
There’s something unconscionably arch about The Scary of Sixty-First. It’s knowingly amateurish in its presentation – grainy 16mm, inconsistently wielded – and purports to get to big themes, and one of our most infamous, and sadly prosaic, boogeymen of recent times. Instead, the lurid inclusion of the crimes of Epstein, and the rich and powerful men linked to him, are simply a symptom of the great age of information, disinformation, conjecture, and jaded commentary in which we live. Nekrasova hits this vein with the accuracy of someone hooked up to that particular IV herself, but merely regurgitates. It’s another product of our times, not an insight into them.
The Scary of Sixty-First is so in-tune to this nebulous ‘now’, that is seems to have its own obsolescence built in as a feature, rather than a bug. Besides the horribly topical subject, the dialogue is liberally sprinkled with terms like cucks and red pilling and references to Pizzagate. While provocation as a narrative choice will never totally go out of style, Nekrasova and Quinn seem to have done as much as possible to leave nothing behind but empty taboo-busting when stripped of the very precarious immediacy of its context. To be sure, it’s undoubtedly startling to see the committed Brown masturbating to news clippings of Prince Andrew’s wedding to Sarah Ferguson. But how long until it’s merely a bewildering piece of visual excess divorced from any topical potency?
Frustratingly, there are glimpses of something more. The line, “Anglophilia is one thing… but paedophilia?” in response to Addie’s sudden mania for the Royal Family, is delivered with such delicious dead-eyed glibness, that it’s suggestive of a sharper satirical sense than Nekrasova and co-writer Quinn were able, or willing, to fully explore. And when the action does ramp up to a cacophony of blood, there is some camerawork that could have time-travelled forward from a Sergio Martino slasher. There is also a fine score from Eli Keszler, which apes Goblin‘s work with Dario Argento, while possessing its own percussive urgency. But while you have to appreciate Nekrasova’s insistence on sticking to her particular aesthetic – or perhaps, anti-aesthetic (or, if you’re ultra-cynical, her brand), it shouldn’t be at the expense of every other aspect of the production. Instead, all that’s left is empty shock tactics, detached from both substance and emotion.
Available to stream on Shudder from Thu 3 Mar 2022