#aaron moorehead

**Shots of the Episode**

Moon Knight (2022)

Spring (2014). By Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson.

Sunrises and sunsets. Some things are just beautiful no matter what. And a constant reminder that you only get so many, so you gotta fuckin' enjoy them.

I watched The Endless a few days ago, took some time off for some kind of wedding or something, and now, sitting back down to write about it, find I still haven’t unraveled its mysteries. I can barely describe them, because I want you to go into this blind, as I did, and not looking for plot points. I can say this: two brothers, having escaped from a cult a decade prior, go back “for a visit” and discover their memories of the place don’t quite line up. That is mere plot. The relationship between the brothers is the story.

Justin (Justin Benson) is the older and wiser of two brothers, who are eking out an existence as house cleaners in Southern California. His younger brother Aaron (Aaron Moorehead) is naive and longs for the unquestioned comfort of his existence as a youth in Camp Arcadia. Justin assures him it is a UFO death cult, but Aaron questions this when he receives a video from a camp member, proving they remain alive. To help Aaron move on, Justin agrees to go back to “say goodbye”. It’s never quite clear what they are saying goodbye to, because of course the answer is that Justin also longs for the structured discipline of the cult. Such things are appealing because they offer simple answers. The difference between the two brothers is that Justin knows “simple” is usually just a way to avoid the basic truth that life is complex.

Or does he? The film sets up a tried-and-true formula: younger character wants a fairy tale, older character knows better, sets out to disprove it. This could go one of two ways in an easier movie: the older character could teach the younger a valuable lesson, or he could rediscover a cliche innocence and go skipping naked through the fields. The Endless does neither. Upon arrival at the camp, they re-encounter Hal (Tate Ellington), whose performance as the spacey leader of the place has heavy elements of Wes Bentley in American Beauty. He is not quite out-to-lunch, nor is the alluring Anna (Callie Hernandez), but they do seem to have checked out of worry, something that appeals to Aaron. They haven’t, of course: there is conflict at Camp Arcadia, and what kind it is comprises the mystery.

I’m going to discuss that now, and I can’t suggest strongly enough that if you haven’t seen the movie, you either stop reading or skip to the last paragraph. Justin must eventually admit his impressions that Arcadia is a death cult, which he reported to the media years ago, are drawn from speculation, rather than ironclad evidence. Aaron eventually learns it is indeed more than just a simple nature retreat. Neither of these things play out exactly as you expect. As Aaron and Justin explore, trying to reconcile their memories with what they are actually seeing, it transpires that the camp is stuck in a time loop, or rather many time loops, and in a Shining-esque turn, the people in it are very old, indeed, having failed to escape. Writing that out now, I realize it is naturally a metaphor for the way Justin and Aaron have not dealt with the issues between them, and how they remain trapped in their own post-Arcadia lives, as if Cain and Abel had both for some reason been exiled from Eden together.

Like the vastly underrated Alex Proyas film Knowing, The Endless is not concerned with how it plays to any kind of modern demographic group. The metaphors in the film are sly and obscure, and it’s a trick of incredible skill on the part of Benson and Moorehead. When you break down the film into literary elements, the idea that the phenomena affecting the camp is important not because of mystical mumbo-jumbo but because it reflects the tension between people is evident. Yet, though the brothers felt natural in their conflicts during the movie, and the time loops grabbed my attention on a more visceral level, I found I didn’t pick up on this until the final shot; I was simply fascinated, and the film had done what so many popcorn films have not: turned off my ridiculously over-active brain.

It did so in a good way. The brothers promise interviewers the film is not autobiographical, though shortly before they began filming, their mother took her own life. Benson told the publication Independent that he thinks that grief came through in their work. How do I, removed from their lives, comment on something like that? I can only say I believe it. Let’s look at Aaron’s performance a moment; he is leadened with the pain of realizing that ordinary life is not only hard but often unrewarding. You might say he hasn’t matured enough to realize this, but is the goal of life really to accept that it sucks? There’s a wistfulness in his voice he hasn’t learned to filter out; it is shared by Justin, but the older man has trained himself to hide it. The forlorn nature of Aaron’s acting brings to our minds how grief actually works, not as movie histrionics, but almost as removal from caring.

The movie’s low-budget nature extends beyond the director and writers being the stars and, you know, actual brothers. The movie was filmed in Anza-Borrego park, which takes up one fifth of San Diego county, so while the movie does come from California, it bears none of the hallmarks of a Hollywood production, or even of the desire to capture West Coast glamour that’s hard for anyone to resist. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn it was Montana or Utah.

Speculative science-fiction, the kind of bizarreness championed in mid-century short stories by masters such as Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury, is a freewheeling category whose only real requirements for membership are strangeness and thoughtfulness. It’s also been largely subsumed at the box office by spaceships and lasers. And yet, I think The Endless might have done well if it had been given a wider release and a small bucket of marketing. It has things horror fans sometimes want---a mysterious threat, shocking supernatural questions, creepy characters of indeterminate motivation. The major difference between this and more standard horror and sci-fi is that these elements start in familiar places but don’t always end up in them. A camp leader who talks like he’s been at the spiked punch turns out to have a method to his madness. Potential romances go places that aren’t in the Potential Romance Playbook. A dire situation involving a man who repeats his life in a Groundhog Day-like loop is left off with a bit of dark comedy.

What does happen in the camp? It’s tempting to say it doesn’t matter and is all a metaphor. Yet this family effort doesn’t make things that simple, since the stuff we saw can’t be explained away. Like this year’s Annihilation, what happens matters less than who it happens to. The film’s last shot is wistful, sad, exciting, a bit funny and bittersweet, and never feels written. It feels earned.

Verdict: Must-See

Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts. I suppose you could consider each one as adding a star.

Must-See

Highly Recommended

Recommended

Average

Not Recommended

Avoid like the Plague

 You can follow Ryan's reviews on Facebook here:

https://www.facebook.com/ryanmeftmovies/

 Or his tweets here:

https://twitter.com/RyanmEft

Something in the Dirt (Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead, 2022)