Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” started it and now “Spree,” another film about a socially-isolated loner gone haywire, tries to expand on that formula by tackling a social media-obsessed millennial. If anything, director Eugene Kotlyarenko’s social commentary is all about our amoral age, where people try to “get noticed” online for the most inane and artificial reasons. It may be over-the-top in its murderous assumptions, but the message is heard loud and clear.
Kotlyarenko’s filmmaking relies on the technical, as his main character uses cell-phone cameras and GoPros in his Uber-like rideshare car by terrorizing his riders in deviously original ways. Of course, the style of directing isn’t anything new, 21st-century filmmaking has delivered narratives told through devices such as phones, computer screens, and security cameras in the past — the best example being Aneesh Chaganty’s inventive neo-noir “Searching.”
“Spree” is meant to be experienced as a terrorizing ride, one which has us emotionally removed from main character and anti-hero Kurt (Joe Keery of “Stranger Things”). Kurt has had an online presence since childhood, vlogging his “Kurt’s World,” a dull slice-of-life sorta thing that he’s been uploading on YouTube for over a decade, live-streaming banal and inconsequential parts of his life while barely getting any views in the process. With almost nobody watching his online exploits, safe for his divorced strip-club DJ dad (David Arquette), Kurt is close to losing his mind. Desperate to tap into the zeitgeist and become famous, the day we meet Kurt is the same day he cracks and decides, enough is enough, he has to “go viral,” no matter the cost.
Being a ride-share driver for the fictional Spree company (one can understand why Uber and Lyft would refuse to have their names used for this movie), Kurt packs his car with cameras, and promises us lots of “interaction” with his passengers, who are told the cameras are there for safety purposes. Regardless, he’s made sure to spike the bottles of water in the car with an unknown poisonous substance, a sip or two and you die on the spot. It’s all aired on a live stream, barely-viewed by more than a couple of people, but as the bodies pile on and the views start to grow in the thousands, you do wonder when viewers will realize that this rideshare from hell is not staged and call the cops.
Kurt’s first rider, on his way to a big meeting, turns out to be racist, this, of course, is a way for Kotlyarenko to ease us into the murderous antics that are to come, that way we do feel less bad when this morally corrupt asshole takes a sip from the toxic bottle. The other riders range from a web-famous comic (Sasheer Zamata of “Saturday Night Live” fame), a bro-ish dirtbag (John DeLuca), a group of party-hungry fiends and Bobby Base Camp (Joshua Ovalle), a famous manic prankster whom Kurt used to babysit many years ago.
The crazier “Spree” gets, the harder it was to look away. The screenplay does try to jam in one too many twists into the narrative, some more obvious than others, but I went along with it, absorbed by the craft and enamored by the tension — of course, I was also appalled by the inhumanity of it all, but one could easily have the same feeling when watching “Taxi Driver” or “Nightcrawler.”
Kotlyarenko co-wrote the script with Gene McHugh, and they make sure that their frames are filled with split screens, live comments, and cell-phone shots. It mostly works. “Spree” may make you feel dehumanized and damn-near dirty by the time it ends, but it resonated with me because it did tap into a kind of zeitgeist that felt disturbing, but, also, eerily familiar to today’s world [B]