Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Chris Marrs Piliero
Starring: Aaron Holliday, Jermaine Fowler, Will Brandt, Paige Searcy, Simran Jehani, Sean Gunn
I'm generally averse to movies that are clearly inspired by Tarantino. Lord knows I endured enough of them in the '90s, and they continue to clog up VOD libraries today. As Tarantino's movies are informed by the work of other filmmakers, aping the former Video Archives clerk usually results in little more than a copy of a copy. It doesn't help that so many filmmakers are so lazy when it comes to ripping off Tarantino, taking his basic tropes and adding nothing of themselves to the mix.
With his feature debut Appofeniacs, Chris Marss Piliero, a director who has previously shot music videos for the likes of Britney Spears and Ariana Grande, isn't shy about his primary influence. Like Pulp Fiction, Appofeniacs opens with a dictionary definition of its title, is split into three chapters that overlap in non-linear fashion, and is packed with pop culture references. But while Piliero takes the Pulp Fiction template, he adds enough distinctive personality to make his debut stand on its own.
Tarantino famously avoids any references to our current times, with even his non-period films set in a version of the world that is essentially stuck in the 1970s. This is where Piliero departs from his obvious inspiration. Appofeniacs is very much a movie of its moment, concerned as it is with a very real and current worry, that of AI deepfake technology. With buckets of blood and lashings of black humour, Piliero creates a series of over the top scenarios that are nonetheless rooted in our anxious reality.
The movie opens with a man blowing his girlfriend's brains out after watching a video of her having sex with one of his friends. Thing is, the video wasn't real. It was created by Duke (Aaron Holliday), a chain-smoking nerd with anger management issues who likes to ruin the lives of anyone to whom he takes a dislike. He does so through the use of an app capable of creating ultra realistic face swap videos.
Appofeniacs is roughly broken into three distinct stories, with characters popping in and out of each story. The first segment sees an uber driver (Will Brandt) lured into having sex with a kinky passenger, Poppy (Simran Jehani), in front of her volatile husband (Michael Abbott Jr) at their home in the Yucca valley. Tensions rise when Poppy receives a video clip of one of the other guests badmouthing her on camera, and the subsequent arrival of an unexpected guest leads to the night turning bloody.
The middle segment owes as much to Larry David as Tarantino, its LA setting giving it the feel of a particularly nasty episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. When store owner Lazzy (Paige Searcy) makes the mistake of getting into an argument with Duke over tipping etiquette at a local coffee shop, she finds herself the latest victim of his deepfake manipulations, made to appear like a racist "Karen" in a fake video. With this segment Piliero takes every white liberal's worst nightmare and keeps pushing the envelope as Lazzy's subsequent paranoia around black people ironically threatens to turn her into an actual racist. It's one of the most hilarious examinations of America's current racial powder keg you're likely to witness.
Things wrap up at the home of Clinto Binto (Sean Gunn), an idol of the cosplay community for his realistic recreations of weapons from fictional properties. Having unwittingly slighted Duke earlier on, Clinto finds himself and his friends subjected to a violent home invasion. There's an explicit Pulp Fiction reference here that is simultaneously an obvious homage and wonderfully innovative. The gag in question is representative of Appofeniacs as a whole; it's a movie clearly indebted to Tarantino, but one which takes that auteur's stylings and refashions them for the sort of Gen-Z audience that probably views Tarantino as stale at this point.
Appofeniacs is a movie tailor-made for film festival screenings. Watching it from a screener, I laughed my ass off several times alone on my couch, and I can only imagine how infectious its no-holds-barred blend of extreme violence and comedy might prove to a packed auditorium. Yet as wild as Appofeniacs is, it's rooted in a very real fear of how AI might be used in the hands of a sociopath. After watching Appofeniacs you'll be scrubbing the internet of every selfie you've ever uploaded.
