Sour Minnows world première at Fantasia, 24 July, 2026
There is a scene, not long into Sour Minnows, where the camera moves from protagonist Ricky (David Brown) working at his laptop in a Los Angeles diner, to the industrial bins in the lane outside – and any fans of David Lynch will feel the dread rising in them. In fact the camera will keep moving past the bins, until it finds a suited TV anchor (Ryan Perez) sitting at a desk and delivering the news – about the emergence of “the odd thing, the thing that lives underneath, between and over top” – to the vacant field before him. Now this feels more like Monty Python than Mulholland Dr. (2002) – although it will remain a deeply Lynchian film, as an ensemble of film-adjacent folk get lost between the fantasy and reality of their lives in the City of Dreams. There is even at one point a reference to a ‘Red Room’.
Ricky is a would-be screenwriter, who for his day job assesses “frag AI chat transcripts” (in which people are psychoanalysed by chirpy LLMs), and suggests to his housemate Tepper (Chase Williamson) that the very best thing about the work is that he can zone out while doing it. Tepper makes short films and music videos in his free time, begging everyone he knows to help out. And Aura (Suzanna Son), whom Ricky has started tentatively dating, keeps auditioning for acting rôles, because, as she herself puts it, “I’m trying to get something going because my life is basically completely empty and vacant.” That combination, which they all share, of aspiration, ennui and emptiness proves to be a gateway for an entity – ‘the yellow thing’ – that starts manipulating and messing with the mindset of all three. Or is this all the psychogenic fugue of LA slackers who do far too many drugs, and have slipped through the looking glass (or the TV flatscreen) between who they are and who they want to be?
Helping, or perhaps hindering, them as they try to find a way through this hallucinatory headspace is the (possibly dead) actor Jojo ‘Vacation’ Monica (Phil Burger) and the mysterious agent Sandra (Julia Jones), both of whom have had their own encounters with this spirit that plays with people like dolls. Yet as Ricky explores the labyrinthine corridors of a cinema and the hidden interiors of his own closet, he is continually at risk of ending up ‘unhoused’ and on the streets, like the six men he and Tepper saw lying prone on the bitumen grotesquely licking its surface – the sight of which appears to have triggered this whole chaotic breakdown of reality. Minnows will appear in handbags and pockets; time, space and identity will morph and merge; grapes and jazz music will serve as psychic defences; and everyone is being watched even as they themselves watch – and watch themselves.
Writer/director/DP/editor Harrison Atkins (Lace Crater, 2015) has captured the alienating, even side-gigging and soul-destroying experience of being a filmmaking hopeful in Tinseltown, while also showing, through the very existence of Sour Minnows itself, the possibility of the indie dream actually coming true. This is a truly metacinematic affair. Its characters reference, endlessly and enthusiastically, films and filmmakers that do not exist, as though conjuring through the power of cinephilia itself a disorienting (yet familiar) alternative universe mapped along the coordinates of filmic discourse. They also literally disappear into what they watch, confusing what is on- and off-screen, and finding their own selves mediated and mirrored in films. It is irrational and surreal, but also something which anyone who has ever immersed themselves in a movie will intuitively recognise and understand. For in Atkins’ weird vision of theatres as zones where we both lose and find ourselves, and of Hollywood as a place that arbitrarily elevates some and obliterates others while preying on addled ambition, all lovers of cinema can see something of their own desires and disappointments reflected.
strap: Lynch on a low budget: Harrison Atkins’ disorienting psychodrama shows film-adjacent Angelenos lost in their dreams and disappointments
© Anton Bitel
