Oliver Bernsen’s feature directorial debut, “Bagworm,” operates with the same emotional logic as that of Joel Potrykus’s works. For those unfamiliar with Potrykus’s films, they often revolve around painfully miserable male characters stuck in a rut, who dig a deeper hole for themselves while refusing any help to find a way out of that hole.
These characters usually lead their lives on a negative arc, as the script probes into their largely self-inflicted pain and misery. That fills these films with a certain brand of derangement that would not be everyone’s cup of tea. You’ll either love it or hate it, and it depends on your capacity to be with these unlikable characters and to digest their self-destructive behaviour. “Bagworm” introduces us to a fairly similar character.
Henry Bernsen’s script follows Caroll (played by Peter Falls), a hammer salesman, who believes that the whole world is against him and has conspired to put him in his miserable state. It presents this paranoia through his subjective point of view, rarely offering us a room to breathe as he descends further down a delirious path. He pities himself for the state of his life, but doesn’t leave us with much to sympathize with him. We learn that he felt cheated in one of his past romantic relationships and isn’t doing well, financially or mentally. Yet, he makes it hard to feel bad for him by refusing help to get rid of his anguish.
He goes out on dates, but remains a barrage of red flags that any woman would choose to avoid. He wants sex, but dreads authenticity or emotional intimacy. If anyone points that out, he gets immediately upset. Besides that, the moment he realizes he doesn’t stand a chance with his date, he goes out of his way to avoid them.
His romantic failure makes him seem like a flag bearer for the men-avoiding-therapy trope, as many of his issues could be solved by basic psychological aid. Even if he doesn’t have the financial means to afford a medical solution, he clearly has friends who want to support him through his healing. Yet, he often rejects them, finding them presumably unbearable.
It all makes him difficult to be around and even more difficult to tolerate him through the film’s 90-something-minute duration. The director doesn’t exactly make it easier. He introduces peculiarly squeamish, visibly gross shots, bound to disturb us. Take the house the protagonist lives in, for example. It looks like it’s filled with something grimy or gooey.
The wooden walls have large holes and feel like someone deliberately left them in that state. It might be Carroll’s own doing, considering he is a hammer salesman with a miserable track record. Yet, the film never exactly explains why he lives in that dilapidated house. It expects us to draw our own conclusions.
That’s why the whole experience reminded me of what it’s like to listen to Geordie Greep’s “The New Sound.” The album is bold, relentless, and frequently outrageous, a look at a pathetic man who wants to be treated with respect but doesn’t give us much to work with. Greep bombards us with strikingly composed but overwhelming songs that exhaust us, despite their intricate musicality and lyricism.
That’s something Bernsen also manages through his style and substance. He shows us appalling shots of Caroll’s body, among other things, that put us right into his nightmarish reality. Even if we hate what the man represents, the directorial approach offers such a precise experience of his misery that it compels us to stick by, if we have the heart for it.
The narrative tone swings between dark comedy and tragedy, as Peter Falls does the most heavy lifting through his dedicated performance, keeping us glued to Caroll’s sodden emotional state. The tragedy comes from the excruciating effort it takes for Caroll to take even the first step toward changing himself, while the comedy comes from his lack of self-awareness and a refusal to heal from his wounds. The latter takes a literal form, with him getting infected by a rusty nail he accidentally steps on.
The script also introduces a minor allegory about a creature and its cocoon, but it remains thematically underdeveloped while addressing the apocalyptic undertones in its script. There are a few nods to people losing hope in their lives, the world being beyond one’s grasp, or the future being beyond one’s control.
While it corresponds with Caroll’s mental state, the script could have made more of an effort to flesh out those bits, using his world as a microcosm to explore the rapidly growing ennui across the world we live in, for its narrative to transcend beyond its immediate scope. Yet, the film offers enough to be invested in its gnarly experience if you have the stomach for it.
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