Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Oliver Bernsen
Starring: Peter Falls, Michelle Ortiz, Robbie Arnett, Corbin Bernsen, Stephen Borrello, Jessy Morner-Ritt, Sydney Winbush, Francesca Galassi
We can watch movie characters be dismembered, blown to pieces or beheaded and shrug it off, maybe even laugh it off, but if someone breaks a fingernail or steps on a piece of LEGO we feel their pain deep in our souls. It's all about relatability, I guess. Unless we've fought in a war we're unlikely to have witnessed any extreme violence, but we've all felt the pain of snapping a nail or stepping on a booby trap set by an inconsiderate toddler too lazy to clean up after their play session. Most of us don't harbour any genuine fears of being fed through a woodchipper by a masked maniac, but we're always looking out for nails protruding from the ground if we're in an unfamiliar back yard.
The inciting incident of brothers Oliver (director) and Henry Bernsen's (writer) Bagworm sees its hapless anti-hero Carroll (Peter Falls) step on a nail in his garden. And boy do we feel his pain. It's not just any old nail, but a rusty spear that immediately spreads an infection throughout his body. Carroll isn't the sort of bloke who takes good care of himself, and in typical male fashion he ignores the symptoms of the infection, allowing it to spread until it consumes his body and mind.
Bagworm's setup sounds like we're in for the latest entry in the body horror resurgence. It does get there eventually, but for most of Bagworm's running time it's a cringe comedy that plays like a cross between Curb Your Enthusiasm and the crawl under the floor absurdism of Tim Robinson. Carroll is a very specific sort of loser, one whose troubles are mostly self-inflicted. A blowhard who always believes he's in the right, Carroll is like Curb's fictional Larry David if he had never made it in comedy and was stuck working a dead end job in the crummiest of apartments, stealing his neighbour's WiFi.
Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle is often wrongly labelled a proto-incel, as people forget that Travis had game (anyone who can pull Cybil Shepherd is far from an incel!); he just also had a self-destructive urge to mess things up. Carroll is cut from similar cloth. Handsome and intelligent but self-loathing, he's a female dating app user's ultimate nightmare: a guy who looks hot in his photos but turns out to have the sort of repulsive personality that can dry a vagina faster than you can utter the words "I think this might have been a mistake." He's a very modern sort of weirdo, one whose mind is poisoned by a mix of conspiracy theories and genuine concerns about the direction of the planet, but who has made that the entirety of his personality (in the opening scene he gives his date a lecture about how she's playing a role in the devastation of the oceans by ordering the fish).
Bagworm has an episodic structure that gives it the feel of a TV pilot with an ending slapped on. Its various vignettes detail Carroll's inability to be remotely normal around people for two seconds, but the various people he meets are often equally odd. Corbin Bernsen, who I assume is the father of the writer and director, pops up as a character who seems just as much of an asshole as Carroll, but the movie follows him home and reminds us that we're all carrying our own troubles. Working as the world's worst Uber driver, Carroll picks up a woman who is strangely turned on by his creepy demeanour, encouraging him to act even weirder, a chapter that culminates in a hilariously ironic punchline.
There's an element of surrealism, with Carroll living in an apartment so decrepit it would be condemned in reality; it's a striking piece of production design made even scuzzier by the gritty 16mm cinematography of Adriel Gonzalez. The house is a breeding ground for every type of nasty imaginable, and at one point some sort of alien moth hatches from a corner. Carroll receives zoom call telling offs from a Chinese boss using a weird avatar and a monotone translator, issuing blunt commands like "do better!" A trip to Vegas for a doomed bachelor party results in a drug trip through the city's beamingly bright night time streets.
In the final stretch the movie leans into its body horror subplot and becomes less interesting for it. The fun of Bagworm is in seeing Carroll interact in hilariously obnoxious fashion with other characters, and this is put aside as the film focusses on his growing physical anomalies. It all leads to a resolution that I'm not sure either the film or its subject have earned. There is an incompleteness to Bagworm that suggests it may have been better suited to a small screen series, but fans of the cringiest variety of absurd humour will find plenty to chuckle at in this deeply odd exploration of the sort of person you cross the street to avoid.
