With Sour Minnows writer/director Harrison Atkins offers supernaturally-infused paranoia from underneath a patina of mumblecore banality. It does not make the greatest of first impressions, but it plants hooks into the audience as it goes. By its conclusion it has defied expectations and – for this viewer at least – formed one of the more interesting films released this year. A distinctive style and narrative approach like this is going to find as many detractors as supporters. I find myself leaning towards the latter camp, but Atkins has certainly cooked up something with an acquired taste.

Housemates Ricky (David Brown) and Tepper (Chase Williamson) are walking home with groceries when they encounter six obsessive strangers lying face-down in the street, each furiously licking the road’s surface. Disturbed by this unexplained encounter, Ricky then begins to find his reality slipping around him: turning up in places with no memory of going there, having time shift and vanish around him, and witnessing a variety of strange phenomena.

There is a lot of flat, suburban disinterest to Sour Minnows. Ricky and Tepper both live seemingly ordinary lives, and the film goes to some lengths in reinforcing the ordinary nature of their day-to-day existence. To a large degree the film feels like classic mumblecore or ‘hangout’ cinema: young protagonists engaged in long, everyday conversation with most incidents in the plot being relatively minor and low-key. Technical achievements are kept to a minimum. Performances by Brown, Williamson, and co-star Suzanna Son are deliberately dry and matter-of-fact. At first this approach can test one’s patience, but I think there is a smart method to the madness.

Philosopher Roland Barthes (bear with me) once wrote about the idea of a ‘punctum’, a small detail one might notice in a photograph that affects the viewer in a specific and personal way. He named it so because he argued such details ‘punctured’ the surface of the photograph and so became more significant that the other less arresting elements presented around it. The rough, low-budget aesthetic of Sour Minnows provides those less arresting elements. They feel mundane on purpose, and allow the more stimulating and uncanny moments of the film to exert a greater impact as a result. There is no reason to share which unexpected moments and surprises worked as punctums for me: they are supposed to be personal, and I think part of the joy of cinema like this is in finding those moments for yourself. What I can say is that those key moments would not have worked as well in a cleaner, more carefully sculpted film.

I started Sour Minnows with a lot of skepticism. As I watched it, I gradually became more emotionally involved in Ricky’s strange trip. This is a film for a narrow, dedicated fanbase, but anyone within that fandom’s borders are going to have a hell of a time.

Sour Minnows had its world premiere at Fantasia Film Festival on Friday 24 July and is screening again on Wednesday 29 July. (link) In Australia it is screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival on 12 and 15 August. (link)