“The whole point was you’re not supposed to space out.”
We find ourselves following two pleasant but aimless young men during the opening scenes of Sour Minnows (2026), as Ricky (David Brown) and Tepper (Chase Williamson) talk contentedly about this and that, though often circling obliquely back to their favourite topics: filmmaking and film. They’re stopped in their tracks when they come across a rather strange event: there’s a group of men, all laying down on the pavement, excitedly licking it. To be fair, it would stop you talking; it surprises Ricky and Tepper so much that they drop their groceries and flee.
At least, that’s what Tepper remembers happening. Ricky’s not so sure. The experience has had an immediate impact on his sense of time and place, affecting his perception. But he tries to carry on with things, which includes a date with fellow cineaste Aura (Suzanna Son) – it’s just a shame that their connection is also being affected by the erosion of any helpful baseline of ‘normal’.
Whilst it’s difficult for Ricky to make sense of what is happening to him, he’s not alone. Something is going on in this town. I mean, you could glean that from the pavement-lickers, but that wasn’t just a one off. That was an odd thing, but this is an Odd Thing, identified with a strange, seemingly sentient yellow hue which comes creeping through all the reveries, time slips and other kinds of sensual dissociation which are now occurring.
However, most of these – or at least in terms of what we, the audience, gets to experience – seem to affect Ricky in particular, even though Tepper and Aura have some rogue experiences of their own. We often stick with Ricky, and he is a sympathetic character, a guy with dreams of doing something more meaningful than the AI testing which he can barely describe out loud, other than bemoaning his ‘day job’ undertaken only to pay his bills. Lots of the experiences we see him going through are fairly nightmarish, too, wresting him ever further from the everyday without providing easy answers (though he does, eventually, find some means to address his questions).
Whilst Sour Minnows plays coy a lot of the time, it’s seemingly happiest when poking gentle fun at film fans, or considering the craft of filmmaking more broadly. With its meta-links to cinema, celebrity and even a spot of analysis of these, it disrupts the comfortable divide between film, filmmaker and viewer. There are, free-floating around here, bigger ideas about purpose, creative and finding meaning in chaos which perhaps resonates all the more these days, after the Odd Thing which was the pandemic and how that seemingly changed everything – not just filmmaking, of course, but certainly impacting upon filmmaking (and the kinds of films which have been possible, or seemed possible since that time). And perhaps Ricky begins to serve as a kind of Gen Z everyman after a while; he’s likeable, and you want him to prevail. You willingly stick with him, even when you’re lost alongside him.
But how to describe Sour Minnows overall? What’s my strapline? How about ‘hypno-mumblecore with a dash of Brecht and some trippy existentialism’? That could do it – perhaps. Truth be told, trying to impose a regular review structure on these kinds of experimental films is always a challenge, but then the viewing experience is a challenge, too. Sure, this is a film which could be classed as studiously inane on first pass – Brechtian mumblecore is a love/hate thing I suspect – but there’s a lot of work and technique, not to mention skill, behind this film. The issue, insofar as films need appreciative audiences, is that it’s always a little difficult to really envision who these films are for, beyond a suspicion that they’re more to analyse and unpack, than to enjoy. But director and writer Harrison Atkins knows this full well, having worked through similar with Lace Crater (2015) – the ‘strange-but-self-aware’ seems to be where his creative interests chiefly lie.
Sour Minnows (2026) received its World Premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival 2026 on July 24th, screening again on July 29th. For more details, click here.