Rating: NR | Runtime: 105 minutes
Studio: Yellow Veil Pictures
Director(s): Sam Dixon & Adam C. Briggs
Writer(s): Sam Dixon & Adam C. Briggs

Drinking wine with all my dead friends.

Sam Dixon and Adam C. Briggs’ A Grand Mockery is very much not for me. I knew that going in, but a mix-up found me with an opportunity to watch it anyway. So, I figured it was worth a shot. Maybe it would surprise me.

I was with it for the first half of Josie’s (Dixon) journey too. The reality of his slow decline into insanity courtesy of a dead-end job cleaning puke at a movie theater and a solitary hobby of recording messages about the dead to leave for a friend within the confines of a local cemetery. Weird doldrums type stuff devolving to the point where his girlfriend (Kate Dillon’s Nelly) can’t help but worry.

And then he disappears.

The film presumably shifts focus onto Nelly as she searches for answers, but that too abruptly ends en route to introducing Mr. Josie—a carbon copy of Josie except for a large growth on the side of his face. He has the same job and problems, but the repetition of scenes we’ve already witnessed suddenly take on an otherworldly surrealist slant with blatant sexual overtones.

There’s stuff about being a “work of art” until the reality of objectification proves too degrading to stand. There’s stuff about sexual energy as a corruptive force wherein celibacy becomes necessary for survival. And there’s a bar scene that strives for Club Silencio levels of metaphor a la Mulholland Drive that ultimately achieves superficial strangeness a la Live’s “Freaks” music video instead.

It’ll surely hit for those on its wavelength, but I couldn’t get there. Not because of the lack of plot or the impressionistic qualities of its nightmarish atmosphere (I did love the theater patron needing a beer and his return to the screen … twice), but because I simply can’t wrap my head around the filmmakers’ intent beyond strange for strangeness’ sake. If that truly was their goal, I guess they succeeded.

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Sam Dixon in A GRAND MOCKERY; courtesy of Fantasia.