Stress Positions (2023 | USA | 95 minutes | Theda Hammel)

Remember 2020? Theda Hammel’s period piece finds John Early as Terry Goon (lol), a harried, incompetent, Covid-conscious caretaker for his exoticized model nephew who’s recovering in isolation from a broken leg.

Isolated in a dilapidated NYC brownstone owned by a soon-to-be-ex who’s jetted off to Berlin, Terry’s also escaping from his own uncertain circumstances. After a winter of quarantine, his small social network is going stir-crazy for novelty, so everyone’s looking for an excuse to break protocol. Sure there were marches, but everyone’s a hot mess and the prospect of seeing what’s up with this hot nephew in the basement is catnip for curious onlookers.

It’s a surprisingly uproarious time capsule from that summer when everyone was an especially hot mess. Popper gas masks doubled as PPE; ubiquitous delivery guys were instantly intriguing; and you had to drop everything to bang pots and pans to thank the essential workers. Backyard socially distanced barbecues involved keeping track of everyone’s dietary needs, personal protection preferences, and overlapping pods. On top of that, the upstairs neighbor is a complete weirdo and virus-denier, but she’s become her own kind of essential if you want to keep the building’s WiFi running.

With overlapping narrators whose reliability becomes increasingly called into question, all the boredom in captivity makes for great fodder for self-reflection and finding a kind of freedom in fiction. This is especially true for someone like Theda Hammel’s character — a masseuse who’s growing increasingly frustrated with her own novelist wife and eager to drink someone else’s booze. But it’s also the case for young model (Qaher Harsh), whose reconstruction of hazy childhood memories and contemplations of the identity he’s still trying to forge were interrupted by twin forces of a global pandemic and a routine scooter accident. Each character’s spin on the languid summer competes with Early’s increasingly frustrated and flailing attempts to hold the place together.

What a bizarre and hilarious time that was, yeah?

Stress Positions plays in U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival both in-person in Utah and online.
Photo by NEON, courtesy Sundance Institute.