Stanleyville (2021)

directed by Maxwell McCabe-Lokos

Canada

88 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

----

I'm absolutely psyched to be reviewing this, as it's been one of my most anticipated films for probably a year or more, and finally getting to see it was very exciting. However - and I mean this in the best way - I can't see any way to talk about this movie other than by describing all the ways in which it was nothing like what I expected it to be.

I was under the impression that this was going to be a pretty straightforward, semi-dystopian workplace dramedy of the type that has been popular as of late due to everybody generally feeling like we're being forced to work desk jobs during the apocalypse. The book Severance, the TV show Severance (no relation), the film Mayhem, and even back a few years the more popular (yet less watchable) Horrible Bosses all encompass this sentiment of getting out your pent-up frustration with your job in weird ways - either that or they present a version of capitalism that is as bizarre as the reality of it is, but in different ways. This is where I thought Stanleyville was heading. Instead, I do not know what this movie is doing or trying to say, and I love that for it. Some synopses call it a "satire", but that word is too small to contain the whole of this film. I also feel like the word "satire" implies a kind of malicious disparagement, and while this movie definitely is saying something about our tired old work routine and how it needs to be abolished, to me, at least, it didn't feel like it was overtly angry about that. I think maybe this is more about lampooning the concept of work than the workplace.

The main character is by far the most fascinating aspect of this film and is in large part the reason why the whole thing feels so unique and unpredictable. She begins the film the way I expected her to: Leaving a dismal-looking office job and an unsatisfying home life to go on a spur-of-the-moment adventure. She's lured into what sounds like an unusual game show that would offer her the opportunity to test her mettle against other people from all walks of life. That was all fairly normal. But there are things about her that make her wildly different from the way protagonists usually are in the kind of capitalism-escape-fantasy film that I thought this would be. Usually there's a degree of relatability; you can place yourself in the shoes of the main character who is running from their boring job or beating up their boss or whatever the situation is. But Maria, Stanleyville's protagonist, only gets more opaque as the film goes on. She doesn't speak much, certainly not about her situation or her feelings towards her job. She's not the most relatable of the cast of characters she finds herself mixed in with - that title would probably go to Felicie (if it goes to any of them), who just really wants a car and hates everybody else. And Felicie doesn't even get that much screentime. Maria is something entirely new. Having a protagonist like her who seems to have come from a totally different film and is equipped with powers that never get fully explained makes Stanleyville impossible to pin down and tough to relate to - which is good, in this case.

This is one of those projects that you can kind of intimate are only scratching the surface of a much vaster idea that the filmmaker had in mind. Sometimes you watch a movie and you just get the idea that whoever made it knows much, much more about it than you do - not in the technical sense, where you're aware of the cast of people physically making the film (by operating the camera, the mics, the props, et cetera), but in the sense that everything that happens feels like it's part of a bigger mythos that you are not privy to the details of. I say this partially because the director's previous short films seem to be tied into this one somehow but also because the aesthetic of Stanleyville is so specific and so well-fleshed-out that it feels like there's so much more to it than what's on the surface.

It's hard to describe how something looks to someone who hasn't seen it, especially something as arty as this. And especially something as specific as this. Nothing else looks like this movie does - it uses a conglomeration of individual objects to make up a single-location film that feels like a huge game of I Spy that you're playing with one eye closed. You pick out recurring themes and things scattered throughout the room but you never know what they mean, yet they do seem to have enormous significance that you can't grasp. The bust with the pith helmet, the big sea shell, the cans of corn, why is there writing in Amharic on the wall? We never find out what the Amharic means (unless you are literate in Amharic). My favorite blink-and-you-miss-it detail is that all the items in the storage room seem to be labeled in different languages - it adds to the feeling of deep weirdness and disorientation in time and space that the whole film cultivates. It's almost like this takes place in an alternate universe.

I really can't contain anything about this movie in words, and I certainly can't pigeonhole it by simply saying that it's strange and new. I'm not gawking at its weirdness or taking exception to it, I'm appreciating and enjoying it for what it is. I think I'm rating it on the higher side of most reviews I've seen, but I don't know, something about this just did it for me. I very seldom have a film escape both my expectations and my ability to judge what's going to happen next in so thorough a manner and so enjoyable of one. Try not to go into this pre-judging it, and if you can, it's probably best to not judge it even while you're watching it - this is a weird maze of a movie (especially for something that takes place largely in a single room) that works better if you just vibe with it instead of applying labels to it.