If you feel like reliving a not-so-distant nightmare, queue up writer/director Michael Bilandic’s fascinatingly bizarre feature, Project Space 13. This suffocating satire offers a trippy look at how a performance artist and two security guards spend a night in SoHo at the height of the 2020 Covid apocalypse.
Nate (Keith Poulson) is an amateur performance artist in NYC who finally gets his big break when he’s invited by Pieter (Jason Grisell) to take up residency at his high-scale Manhattan art gallery. Nate’s provocative and jarring piece includes self-isolation in a prison-like cage, relying on a dominant robot accomplice for food (fried bugs), relief (excrement supplies), and torture (electrical shocks). However, as luck would have it, the city shuts down on night one of his three-month show. But Nate is stubborn and refuses to quit, so the galley hires a security guard duo (Hunter Zimny and Theodore Bouloukos) to watch over the space and Nate. As the city turns more chaotic by the minute and deranged, desperate civilians begin to threaten their safety, the three men start preparing for the worst – spilling their darkest secrets in the process.
Project Space 13 has a Marina Abramović meets Dash Snow vibe that makes for an intentionally uneasy watch. Bilandic’s daft protagonist, embodied by Keith Poulson, is a self-righteous artist who claims to dwell at the center of art & technology. His stance is admirable, even sympathetic, but his method of getting his point across via provocative performance art while the city plunges into chaos around him is charmingly naive.
Cinematographer Sean Price Williams, best known for his work on the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, lends his artfully chaotic eye to this micro-indie feature, giving the film an unsteadiness that perfectly encapsulates how we all felt during the height of the Covid confusion. Further pushing the film into the arthouse column is the original score by “Cult Film Composer” Paul Grimstad (Heaven Knows What, Jobe’z World). I’m still trying to shake the sounds of a baby’s cry set against a sporadic drum line beat from the opening sequence. And trust me, the end title credit remix is a jam worth waiting for.
Project Space 13 is streaming exclusively on MUBI.
