At least, it’s being called a horror film. Rather, it looks more like a piece of film art — documenting the experience of an 18-year-old wandering through a Ryan Trecartin exhibit while listening to Mac DeMarco’s Salad Days. Just as DeMarco is aware of — and has made a brand of — his manchild schtick, the film is deliberately adolescent (while also actually being made by an actual adolescent), marketed in the trailer as “a film that could only be made by an 18 year old girl.” (Said 18-year old is trans filmmaker Dylan Greenberg, who, it turns out, has spoken about being inspired by Trecartin, as well as Guy Maddin.) It turns out, Maddin/Trecartin-influences + DeMarco + Self-Aware Adolescent Sensibility looks like a pretty winning formula.
In watching the 3.5 minute trailer, you’ll be plunged into a world of “filth” in “a trip beyond your wildest dreams and your wildest nightmares” — narrated by DeMarco. The budget is so intentionally low that facial hair is drawn on with marker, and special effects are borrowed from other films. DeMarco plays a “character” called The Master, and a gaggle of young people play other… people? Mermaids? Settings? (“You mean to tell me that, as we speak, we’re inside my sexual organ?” asks one character.)
Here’s the official synopsis (via Consequence of Sound):
DARK PRISM is about three unique and strange women, each battling their own demons, in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Although they exist in different times and perhaps different worlds, their lives will soon collide due to the mysterious appearance of a massive prism. Slowly, the world as one knows it disassembles, and the nonsensical becomes the sensical… in DARK PRISM.
Greenberg finished her first feature film, Wakers, when she was just 17. She said of Dark Prism on her Facebook page, “Instead of seeing PAN , go see the OTHER fucked up movie with mermaids in it!”
Watch the trailer:
The film is allegedly finished, and, per its YouTube page, “will begin screening soon.”