Manodrome
Is this the Christian critique to the manosphere cult? With a Jewish main character? There’s so much religious imagery (and songs), it can’t be a coincidence.
Our Uber man(sch) is introduced ogling a breastfeeding woman in the back of the car, and she bolts, pissed at the creepy ass guy. Turns out he was more innocent (I think), since her girlfriend is extremely pregnant, but still working long hours on the supermarket.
At first I truly though the girl was a figment of his imagination, like Fight Club, but I’m not sure anymore, with that final bit.
The protagonist was working in a blue collar good job, but the factory closed, so he fell back to Uber people around.
His only hobby is being a gym rat, where he is recruited to a Andrew Tate/Jordan Peterson-like toxic masculinity cult. It’s explicitly a kind of Incels Anonymous, complete with meetings with celibacy dick-measuring contests, and unlicensed psychiatric group therapy. The big mansion where they live, with all that wood panels, contains an handgun that eventuality finds its way into our protagonist.
Said protagonist starts gets even angrier, seeing penises everywhere. The gym gay cohort conquered the remote control for the TV and changed from heavy metal to disco music. But our protagonist is too chickenshit to say anything yet. The sexual tension is palpable.
After more and more talk with low-rent Jordan Peterson followers, our protagonist snaps. The pregnant girlfriend is locked in the house, he cruises for some action. He finds the gym dude, follows him into a secluded location on the factory he was fired from, and lets his partner actively do butt stuff (with condom, no raw dogging). As they talk about food, he shoots the guy and leaves him for dead.
This makes him a lot of money, pawning his stuff, so he gets back to the girlfriend, who had the kid now. They take care of the baby, but she is very afraid, so leaves at the first opportunity. The baby remains.
Without any more family, he takes the baby to the frat house, and waves the gun around, since the cops are onto him. It looks like he is about to kill himself, but he shoots the older manosphere recruiter! And a cop too! The group disbands after that.
He runs away until he finds a senior citizens home, where suicide fails again. There, he finds a manly father figure, a giant janitor that tells him his weird story about fishing, but most important, advises him to talk about his feelings instead of bottling them up to rage point. Our protagonist ends up curling in the fetal position on his lap. The sirens approach, cut to black.
Jesse Eisenberg sell the awkward bumbling idiot very well, but if the girlfriend is real, this is just not really about the manosphere, is it? Doesn’t make much sense, the ending is even more baffling.
I like how this open similarly to Bad Santa, two films that could not be more different…
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.