Maybe
the hippie commune Justin Smith rescued his younger brother Aaron from was not
quite the “castrating doomsday UFO cult” he thought it was, but you still would
not call it a New Religious Movement. Regardless, the brothers are probably not
being unduly alarmist when they assume the worst from a “goodbye” video they
receive from a former friend. Against the older brother’s better judgement,
they will visit their former “family” before they “ascend” in Justin Benson
& Aaron Moorhead’s The Endless, which screens
during the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.
Frankly,
one look at the smiling tool standing at the gate of Camp Arcadia would have
made us do an immediate one-eighty. The anti-social fellow who keeps brusquely walking
in straight lines is also rather off-putting. However, Anna, their big sister
figure is as lovely and welcoming as ever—and she hardly seems to have aged at
all.
In
contrast, life has been hard for the brothers in the years that followed their Camp
Arcadia escape. In fact, Aaron remembers the plentiful food and kumbaya
gatherings rather fondly. Justin was hoping their visit would serve as an
antidote to his nostalgia, but it might have the opposite effect. However,
after the older brother gets the heave-ho from Arcadia, he stumbles into the
truth. The real secret of Camp Arcadia is truly Hellish in a Sisyphean sense, but
the camper cultists have embraced it out of their warped hippy spirituality.
There
is no question the big reveal and its implications takes a while to unpack.
However, it mostly all tallies, once you account for the varying severity of
the x-factor in question. In any event, the cosmic scope and ambition of Endless are quite impressive, especially
considering the intimate scale of the drama. Filmmaking partners Benson and
Moorhead are terrific as the Smith Brothers. They really demonstrate the fine
line between love and resentment, constantly crossing over and back. Perhaps drawing
on their experience making Resolution,
Spring, and the “Bonestorm” segment of V/H/S Viral, B&M really project a sense of the brothers’ long, chaotic shared
history together.
In
all honesty, The Endless is one of
the more intelligent and emotionally sophisticated genre films you will see all
year, but it has received unfairly middling notices thus far at Tribeca. This
may well be due to the cult-themed subject matter. At a time when the advocacy-media
is promoting large-scale demonstrations, any film that problematizes acquiescence
to the moral judgement of the collective unit is likely to face instinctive
resistance, so to speak.
