Spree

Spree is a film that's probably going to age badly. Like Infamous from a few months back (that feels like decades) it's very much a film of the moment. A story of online attention seekers craving likes and faves to fill the emptiness in their lives but unlike Infamous it's actually pretty good.

Kurtsworld96. A videoblog documenting everything Kurt Kunkle does everyday. His mantra's are "ABC, always be charging." (this one will make David Mamet's face bleed) & "If you aren't streaming your life, you don't even exist." The irony is that in online terms Karl may as well not exist. He's been doing this for years but no one is watching and it's killing him. He's getting desperate. He'll do anything to get his viewership above double digits. So one fateful day he plasters his Spree car (a fictional version of Uber) with cameras and heads out into the world armed with poisoned bottles of water and an electric drill. He knows the snapchat/insta stories viewers of the world want sensationalism and goddamnit he's going to give it to them.

Remember Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler from a few years back? Remember how creepy and pathetic he was? Now imagine he got into the social media game. That's Spree and while it mightn't be as good as that film this certainly hits the spot as a look at an instantly disposable culture, a culture always looking for the next big buzz while forgetting the last one in seconds. It's something we're all guilty of these days. Look at twitter, everyday we latch onto something new, roaring and shouting about it and the next day/that evening/an hour later there's another thing catching our eye. Spree is about the people creating that new content and the lengths they'll go to for those fake internet points. Watching it you may think it's far fetched but it ain't really. Think back over the last year or two, youtube "celebs" discovering the bodies of people who've committed suicide and filming their bodies while laughing, spewing racism and homophobia to cause outrage and gain more viewers, taking part in looting and having the FBI raid their homes. Real life makes Spree look quite plausible.

A fine turn from Joe Keery makes it look even more plausible. He nails that sense of neediness and the pathetic, pathological want for attention you get from those who share every aspect of their lives online. Kurt's a man with no sense of space or morality. Everything is about attention, everything is about him. Extreme narcissism has turned him psychopathic but because Keery plays the part so well, even at his worst you'll still feel bad for him, especially in the scene where his inner most fears are played for laughs in a comedy club while a close up camera view livestreams every emotion playing across his face to his new found audience. Unfortunately a lot of his good work is undone by the film's refusal to totally condemn him. The people he picks up in his car are walking cliches, designed to play to the audiences prejudices so we won't really mind when he's does them in. No one really cares when a nazi dies do they?

This fence sitting attitude pervades the rest of the film too. Everyone who gets more than a couple of minutes screentime is living their lives online, be it Joe's DJ father (David Arquette), the slimy sexist Mario (John DeLuca) who seems to have based both his look and schtick on Tom Cruise's character from Magnolia, or Jessie Adams (Sasheer Zamata), the instagram famous comedian who Kurt finally meets his match with. The film doesn't paint this modern lifestyle as a healthy one, with one character in particular finally seeing the error of their ways but come the close of the film it totally reverses it's stance, giving the entire movie a confused, messy tone and you'll leave the cinema looking at your phone thinking "is this a good thing or a bad thing?"

Spree is in cinemas now. It's blunt, it's messy, it might give you a headache but it's never boring and it's leading turn from Joe Keery is a memorable one.