“Were people laughing?” director Eugene Kotlyarenko asked festival goers standing crammed in the theatre hallway searching for the exit. “I didn’t watch the screening… what about the jump scares- did people actually jump?” Several members of the audience assured Koltyarenko the film hit its mark, congratulating him on his way out.
Shot exclusively off iPhones and Go-Pros, and often taking the form of an Instagram live or Twitch stream, the film was designed for a streaming service, and hopefully will hit one soon. The murder-filled black comedy is part of the festival’s NEXT category, which is handpicks innovative and bold films.
Spree follows young rideshare driver desperate to make his mark as an internet personality. The prolonged Black Mirror episode, produced by rappers Future and Drake, puts Joe Keery in a new element that completely makes you forget about America’s Sweetheart Steve Harrington- as a matter of fact, you forget he’s even Joe Keery, as the audience becomes completely engulfed in his new, twisted persona in this villain origin story. Enter @KurtsWorld96, the Joker of rideshare apps.
Despite posting for over a decade, @KurtsWorld96 lacks a social media presence- unlike the kid he used to babysit, @BobbyBaseCamp (Josh Ovalle), who has an immense social media following, and has the likes, clothes, and LA mansion to prove it. The audience straps in for Kurt’s quest for impressive content as he picks up his Spree riders, broadcasting live to his audience of roughly five through his homemade 360-degree car camera rig, as he pursues #TheLesson, his last push to go viral.
“We all came to this agreement fifteen years ago that sharing is inherently good, so Kurt is a byproduct of that. He is going to share, give a tutorial, and help people regardless of what he’s actually doing…so you arrive at this very dangerous place,” Koltyarenko explains during the Q&A session, which he streamed in its entirety on his Instagram Live.
In a world where social media consumes everyday life, and we rely on strangers to get us to point A to point B, the social media satire film is very of the moment. It leaves you questioning your personal social media usage, as well as thinking twice about taking that complimentary water bottle from your Uber driver.
As a crucial element of the film is Kurt’s profession as a Spree Driver, hours of shooting where spent in the car. Kotlyarenko called the in-car filming process “nightmare-ish,” and comparative to shooting Jaws. He explains they would do 30 minute takes at a time using the in car rig system and makes it a point to clarify, “Joe was actually driving “75% of the time.”
Dorky, hopeless, and detached, Kurt is so far from the person he aches to be. Kotlyarenko goes on, “He’s so bad at this. And that was something that was really important for me and my co-writer: we don’t want him to be cool, or someone you want to emulate, or look at and are like wow, he’s fun, and sexy, and cool! He’s cringy. This guy is a bad performer, he’s bad at social media.”
When speaking of Kurt’s character, Koltyarenko added, “I wanted to remove the psycho-sexual element…his morality driven by just the likes, I wanted him to be a pure product of his entire consciousness being formed by the internet.”
The beginning of the film, showcasing some of Kurt’s oh-so-captivating YouTube content including reviews of new vape juice flavors and a draw my life lacking artistic talent, were actually intended to merely be exercises to get Keery into character. After the initial edit of the film was completed, Kotlyarenko realized including the videos would a good entry point for the audience to begin to understand Kurt.
Kotlyarenko says he worked with Keery to research, mostly by exploring real life “wannabe influencers” in order to find out how to bring together the character of Kurt in the most authentic and unsettling way possible, “I made a cringe compilation for him, of people who want to desperately wanted to be influencers and had like 10 followers and post 20 times a day.” To find similar videos to what the duo researched, he instructed the audience to, “do a Google search for ‘vaping’ but instead of most popular, sort the search by most recent videos…the stuff with 0 views.”
Koltyarenko acknowledges that someday, “All this shit is going to change…and hopefully once everyone alive grows up on this crap, people will find a new morality that’s better: less dehumanized, less desensitized. But this film takes place in 2019, all this sewage is out there… It is disturbing, but showing this stuff and representing it doesn’t validate it, it just reveals it. That’s the only way you can critique something, by showing it for what it is…It’s just observing the world around us, I mean it’s felt like there was a mass murder in the United States every week, and that is obviously something really disturbing. This isn’t like a head on take down of that, but…I think it is. I think it’s a critique that a lot of those people are desperate the same way the influencers are. Desperate need for attention.”