Rating: NR | Runtime: 87 minutes
Release Date: March 31st, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Brainstorm Media
Director(s): Alex Lehmann
Writer(s): Chris Dowling & Alex Lehmann

Your dog doesn’t lie?

Director Alex Lehmann and co-writer Chris Dowling could have introduced Maggie (Dianna Agron) just as she’s pulling into her estranged father’s (Thomas Haden Church) driveway, but instead decide to let us meet her alone first—sitting in a diner, visibly distraught, with the waitress (Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris) making sure she’s okay before walking away. It’s brief but important. Maggie’s cell phone rings and she ignores it. It rings again while driving and she does the same.

So, rather than pretend like Acidman is about reconciliation, we know straight away that it’s actually about understanding. Because while it would be nice to perhaps mend fences with the parent who ran away decades ago, she could have tried finding him any time before. To do it now, while presumably running away herself, means the answers she currently seeks lie within.

I won’t give away why this is true since the film uses it as a climactic reveal, but knowing there’s a motivating factor to Maggie’s struggle helps us engage with the story in a way that ensures we aren’t constantly wondering when she’s taking him to a hospital. That’s the trajectory this journey usually takes: Maggie discovers her father is unhinged (prone to disengaging with the moment and caught up in a fantasy that alien life is communicating with him), tricks him into seeing a doctor, and gets him on the medication that makes him what she needs him to be.

But that’s boring. Familiar. Reductive. Because he’s not doing any harm. You could say he left precisely so he wouldn’t. The question is therefore whether she can allow herself to reconcile these identities. Can she learn something from his regrets without demanding he learn something too—something he surely already knows?

That’s a concept with which too many films refuse to engage. This idea that people don’t have to be fixed. The quickest way to finally being able to accept yourself is to allow yourself to accept others as who they are regardless of how it runs counter to societal norms and your expectations. This man obviously wants to communicate. He wants so desperately to be listened to without judgment that he takes his voice to the stars. He’s alienated himself because he believes the world has alienated him.

So, for Maggie to see that and know she isn’t that far removed despite having the awareness and clarity of self-reflection thanks to his example, it’s not difficult to simply give him what he needs. Because indulging him hurts no one. But its impact upon his existence is profound. It reminds him he isn’t alone.

And it reminds her that she isn’t either. All the anxiety, frustration, and fear that drove her to this point doesn’t make her defective. It doesn’t mean she must also become a pariah. She can forgive him and embrace the fact his struggles cannot be erased with a flip of a switch. That love doesn’t demand solutions as much as patience and empathy.

Church delivers one of his best performances (his final scene is unforgettable) as a gentle yet unpredictably scatterbrained crackpot with an intense desire to be heard, but it’s Agron who steals the show with an emotionally charged thaw from guarded uncertainty to compassionate relief. Maggie is so desperate to prove she isn’t her father that she forgets there’s so much of his she’d aspire to possess. It’s all still present when he isn’t pushed into a corner. So, it must just exist in her if she stops pushing herself into one too.

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Thomas Haden Church and Dianna Agron in ACIDMAN; courtesy of Brainstorm Media.