Rating: NR | Runtime: 94 minutes
Release Date: September 19th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Gravitas Ventures
Director(s): JohnPaul Morris
Writer(s): Jake Burgess, JohnPaul Morris & Broderick Steele

I can’t call 911 cause the cops are after us.

It could have just been a road trip comedy about friendship, love, and hijinks with a Millennial flair and it would have been fine. Forgettable, but fine. Ray (Tanner Presswood) is going through a break-up. Paul (Simon Elias) is discovering his first post-college “Big Boy” job isn’t quite what he expected. And both have been tasked to guard a one-of-a-kind ring as co-Best Men in Josh’s wedding. It will therefore be a busy couple days of introspection, existential crisis, and responsibility. They might not be up to the task.

Instead of just seeing those threads through to their logical conclusions, however, Quicksand director JohnPaul Morris and his co-writers Jake Burgess and Broderick Steele throw a few curveballs. How will Ray and Paul react when forced to ask their parents for help? When Ray’s ex calls to try working things out? When they inevitably lose the ring? Enter manic episodes of uncertainty and over-the-top exaggerations of reality as we start to see that Ray and Paul have become each other’s crutches just as much as one another’s hero.

And rather than mine that reality deeper, Morris and company test it instead. That’s the difference between weighty dramas and absurd comedies. The latter has no need to flesh things out beyond how the dynamic impacts the characters’ decision-making skills within highly volatile situations. Who takes control when they witness a murder? When they’re kidnapped? When they must commit a crime themselves? The film takes a hard left turn towards chaos that’s very incongruous to the opening, but it’s no less entertaining as a result. Or memorable.

Just don’t get caught up in that more serious nature of the start. Unlike a Harold & Kumar, which embraces its irreverence from frame one, Quicksand tries making this adventure a case of “bad luck.” But since said luck is when the script is at its most fun, couldn’t the insanity have been the norm instead? Give me more nonsense like gun-toting Boomers joining shootouts rather than call the cops. More funny life parallels like how Ray and Paul aren’t that different from the two men trying to kill them.

Presswood and Elias are a fun duo and I like that they don’t need a falling out for the narrative to pivot or for a lesson to be learned. These guys are best friends. If they have any faults when it comes to the other, it’s that they care too much. Their relationship is wholesomely co-dependent in ways that ultimately send them spiraling through a nightmare with a lot more blood and dead bodies than anyone probably expected, but they always listen to and champion each other. If they go down, they’re doing it together.

The rest is noise regardless of how serious or dangerous it proves. This is a world where trauma doesn’t exist, so there’s no use sweating the small stuff like murder, car theft, or bodily injury. All that matters is finding the confidence to escape the doldrums and become the men they hope they are. Men who recognize love and are mature enough to deal with its complications. Men who can be relied upon to watch over things that mean the world to someone they care about. If people must die to figure those things out, so be it.

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Tanner Presswood and Simon Elias in QUICKSAND; courtesy of Gravitas Ventures.