Open Wide has its world première at Chattanooga Film Festival, 22 June 2025
From its title, you might imagine that Open Wide is concerned with dentistry – and indeed the first sound we hear is of someone breathing deeply, as though inhaling laughing gas, even if what we see is a two-holed view from a mask of a living room with a male figure walking around.
Certainly Sam Fox’s short film will have viewers, along with the protagonist Phoebe (Fox’s co-writer, co-producer and co-designer of production and costume Lara Repko), squirming with ever greater discomfort in their seat, and all kinds of oral fixations do come into play from early on. “Oh my god, you smell fresh,” Ron (Ethan Daniel Corbett) tells Phoebe, sniffing the side of her face deeply. “I wanna know what you taste like,” says Ron’s wife Vera (Ashley Smith), licking Phoebe’s cheek with an approving “yum” and opening her own legs wide as she invites Phoebe to “taste me”. This couple is primed and ready to swing, and sat between them on the couch is Phoebe, looking, as Vera observes, “just like an angel”, or indeed rather like Twin Peaks’ Audrey Horne.
Phoebe is a prim, innocent Catholic, but also, as she herself admits, “open-minded” and eager to test her boundaries with more experienced lovers. This domestic space is like a theatre – or movie set – where Phoebe is all at once centre stage and audience to a show put on by the couple, who set the “mood” with smooth jazz records and eventually handheld lighting, all building to the moment where they finally unmask to reveal who they are, what exactly they are into, and what is really on the evening’s menu. For in trusting outsider Phoebe to enter their domain and their strange lives, Ron and Vera expect a certain quid pro quo – and Phoebe is being lured seductively to the point of no return, even as side-players (Madonna Young Magee, Wolf Homme) are introduced, each with their own appetites. Phoebe has decided in advance to bring no judgement and to say yes to everything – but she will realise, too late, that she has her limits, and and that this ‘modern family’ may be way too much for her.
Open Wide presents the threesome as horror spectacle, reducing a deeply dysfunctional family’s perverse tastes to a performative freakshow. At first Phoebe’s growing apprehension is expressed through jarring edits and glitchy, juddery effects – until finally the living room erupts into full-on psychedelia as the trap is sprung and there is no way out but in. With the night progressing in all kinds of unexpected directions, this is at once funny, tense and fucked up, as a crazy clan messes with sweet, yummy Phoebe, good enough to eat, like cats toying with their next meal. Having decided, like the viewer, to take a walk on the wild side, Phoebe now has a front row seat, like a dentist’s chair, on all the unfolding madness and mayhem – and she will indeed end up be saying “aaaargh”.
strap: Say aaaaargh!: in Sam Fox’s freaky, funny horror short, a young woman gets into a threesome with the wrongest of wrong couples
© Anton Bitel
