It’s hard to decipher whether or not writer/director Dasha Nekrasova’s debut feature The Scary of Sixty-First is fetishizing the rabbit hole littered with conspiracy theorists and Q Anon stans or if it’s ironically holding a mirror up to their insanity and shouting ‘See, look how crazy you’re acting!’. In either case, Nekrasova’s done her job. Nekrasova, alongside co-writer Madeline Quinn, abrasively shoves the red pill down our throats and draws us into a reality where spiritually tortured women are given a voice, and a body, to express their most repressed and traumatic secrets.
Distributed by cult favorite Utopia, known for its support of boundary-pushing indie films, The Scary of Sixty-First tells the story of two young women, Noelle (Madeline Quinn) and Addie (Betsey Brown), who find their dream apartment: a beautiful walkup in Manhattan. However, their sighs of relief are quickly met with caution; a dead rodent in the fridge, a mirror hung on the ceiling in one of the bedrooms, and a mysterious tarot card in the bathroom all feel like bad omens to the new roommates. But none of that compares to the graphic and sexual night terrors Addie experiences on that first night. Something is very wrong here.
Soon after Addie’s phantom spell, a mysterious girl shows up at their apartment. The girl (Nekrasova) claims to be an independent investigator who demands entry into the apartment to look for clues left by the previous tenant: Jeffrey Epstein.
“Something extremely sinister happened in this apartment,” says the girl to Addie. “In your room.” Noelle takes the bait and joins the girl in frantically trying to uncover the mystery of the apartment. They turn into amateur internet sleuths as they mull over publicly available Epstein evidence, do a virtual deep dive into his “pedo island,” and uncover the fact that the apartment used to be orgy flophouse. Addie, meanwhile, continues to be controlled by supernatural occurrences. The further the girls go down the rabbit hole of bizarre theories and developing romantic connections, the more unhinged Addie becomes. “The important thing is we are awake,” says the girl. But we are left to wonder, is this nightmare we are living in real life, or just a bad dream?
The Scary of Sixty-First is not the most polished film, or even that scary – as its title would suggest – but what it does so well is bathe you in uncertainty and doubt. It’s a psychological gnawing of the mind that is politically and socially provocative, which is to be expected for a film that calls itself an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Shot in 16mm film by cinematographer Hunter Zimny and set to a score by Uncut Gems contributor Eli Keszler, The Scary of Sixty-First is a deadpan delivery thesis statement on the disturbing subculture of conspiracy theorists and the tangled webs they leave behind.
Distributed by Utopia. The Scary of Sixty-First is now playing in select theaters and VOD.
