After accepting what is clearly the latest in a long list of bizarre challenges from his bullying brother, pale nerd Abbie agrees to remain on a couch until he reaches the end of a Pac-Man video game. As time passes he suffers almost every indignity one can imagine, and is covered in all manner of unpleasant bodily fluids.

If the film sounds hard to categorize, that’s because it is. But despite the odds, it is never boring. Relaxer is an unusual combination of the mundane and the banal with the truly bizarre and fantastical. And the tone doesn’t change as the film moves between the two poles. Exaggerated sound design adds some drama and some oddness - the wind howls outside, the persistent video game music is loud and omnipresent. The shot never leaves the one room.

Abbie is alone on the couch for most of the film. In the opening scene he is harangued by his brother. He manages to get a friend to visit, and while the friend is supposed to bring pizza and soda, he fails on the pizza and drinks the soda himself. The one woman in the film is an ex-coworker who is now a nurse and she is perhaps the only sympathetic character. But the rest of the time Abbie is alone. You might think it would be hard to make this dramatic, but scenes like the one where he uses a tool fashioned from a tripod to try to reach a cup which might still have some liquid left in it are weirdly gripping.

It found it impossible not to buy in to the reality of this world - I totally suspended disbelief. Not once did I wonder why he didn’t just get up, because in the context of the film is makes perfect sense.

I imagine this is what the film Castaway might be if it was slacker magical realism. Abbie is like a man stranded on a desert island (his couch) who comes up with ingenious strategies to survive, including tools (aforementioned tripod grabber hand), entertainment (popsicle stick banjo) and companionship (dead crow friend).

It isn’t hard to speculate the backstory, such as the bullying brother, or analyze meaning into every twist, but that is aside from the point. The film stands alone, on its own terms. But if we must theorize, I can imagine it alludes to the lameness of young white masculinity and the ills of capitalism, consumerism and productivity. It is definitely not a call to action, to enter the world with a good attitude, i.e. to get off the couch. Relaxer isn’t meant to be taken literally because if you try to break it all down, it doesn’t exactly make any sense. And yet some of it is very literal and not meant as a metaphor for anything.

Spoiler: about halfway through the film we can see that time has passed because Abbie now has a beard and it is winter rather than summer. It is 1999 and in this alternative history, the Y2K scare is warranted and results in instant hilarious chaos. Civilization has ended but only life on the couch remains for Abbie.

When finally invited to leave the couch at the end of the film, in a ruined world, wizened and physically debilitated, Abbie replies, “No. I’m going to relax a little longer.”

Watch a teaser.

Saturday, October 6, 2018 at 8:30 PM Rio Theatre

Monday, October 8, 2018 at 8:45 PM The Cinematheque