Slow Machine

 
Slow Machine (Paul Felten and Joe Denardo) is an enigmatic 2020 film about an actress unable to distinguish between roles that she is playing and reality.  This is one explanation for the movie's eerie events and paranoiac sensibility.  Of course, whenever paranoia is involved, there is the possibility that the shadowy figures bent on "retribution" as the film's heroine puts it, are real and that she is actually in danger -- it's not paranoia, as the saying goes, if they are really out to get you.  The film's structure seems to oppose this latter possibility although the boundary between real events and fantasy is unstable and we're never sure exactly what we're seeing.

Stephanie, an actress living in Queens, is fearful that she is being pursued.  She has fled to the suburbs where she has crashed with a group of musicians who are rehearsing some new songs.  (The music has a droning, vaguely menacing sound, melancholy and anguished, a bit like something by Nick Cave.)  Stephanie says that she fears retribution.  She seems agitated and unhappy.  However, she is exceedingly voluble, almost too loquacious for the situation and her moods are volatile -- at first, she refuses to play touch football with the band members, but, then, engages in the game with a sort of feral aggressiveness. A title takes us back in time a week.  Stephanie wakes up after being black-out drunk in a bed in a strange, minimally decorated apartment.  The apartment belongs to a cop, Gerard, who blithely observes that Stephanie should check to see if she remains "unviolated" (which she does).  Gerard works for some sort of secret police and claims that he has assassinated various people.  Gerard also claims that he is married, but seems to flirt with Stephanie.  He asserts that his apartment is a sort of 'safe house' operated by the agency for which he works.  Next, we see Stephanie at an AA meeting that she disrupts by claiming that she invites "judgement" and that she thinks "shame" is important to her recovery.  By this time, we note that Stephanie sounds slightly different every time we hear her speak -- sometimes, she has a faint accent that is impossible to place (she claims to be Swedish); on other occasions, she speaks with a Southern accent.  Stephanie meets with an icon of indie films, Chloe Sevigny, playing herself.  While the women drink, Sevigny describes a recent audition.  She was sent a tremendously compelling fragment of a script and, then, summoned to some remote and decrepit warehouse to read for the part.  At first, the foreboding location harmed her concentration but, then, she read beautifully -- the text poured forth from her with complete conviction.  After rendering this spectacular performance, the author producing the play, Sevigny reports, lit a match and burned the script to ashes.  And she never heard from the author or the play's producers again.  At a party, Stephanie meets Gerard and a belligerent cop from another agency.  Stephanie performs a part for which she is auditioning, a Gothic monologue involving incest and drunkenness and crime.  Gerard is a little dismissive saying that the lines are "low-end Sam Shepherd."  Stephanie and Gerard fight and, although they seem to be teasing one another, the tussle ends with the cop lying on the floor with his skull fractured -- an accident, but a dire  one.  Stephanie, then, flees to the commune of musicians recording songs in the suburbs.  (Apparently, the band is called "Slow Machine"; the other meaning for that phrase is the slow, deliberative approach of an unavoidable and disastrous fate -- at least, this is what Stephanie says.)  A scruffy band member tries to have sex with Stephanie.  She rejects his advances -- he has a girlfriend in the band -- and goes back to Gerard's apartment.  There, she finds an argumentative and imperious lady realtor who tells her that Gerard died.  She can't say anything else because "the apartment isn't even listed yet."  Another title tells us that some years have passed.  Stephanie is with a casual pick-up, watching a film in which she is acting with a strong Texas accent.  The man leaves and Stephanie calls her husband and small daughter for a Skype or Zoom conference.  Stephanie's husband seems sad and defeated.  Stephanie tells the little girl a bedtime story about a pig named Bertram who knows that "there is something bad in the forest."  She recounts how Bertram rooted in the ground and, then, dug down and unearthed a wet --- But the little girl has fallen asleep.  Stephanie seems to be in some kind of trance and we suspect that she was about to disclose that Bertram the pig had dug up a corpse -- possibly the body of poor Gerard.  But we don't hear the end of the story and her husband, who has pop-bottle thick glasses, says: " I was a little worried where you were going with that (story)."  In the final scene, we see Stephanie venturing down a dank-looking corridor.  It seems that she has entered the uncanny space where Chloe Sevigny auditioned with the best script she had ever read -- a text that was, then, burnt to ashes.  (The end of the movie is unclear but it is possible that what we have been watching is, in fact, some version of the script offered to Chloe Sevigny and, then, irrevocably destroyed.) 

The film is very short, about 71 minutes long and interesting throughout.  There are probably several different interpretations that one could advance about Slow Machine.  My view is that the film reverses the relationship between reality and performance -- we tend to think of performance as commenting on reality and the dominant term in our existence is the real as opposed to the imaginary.  But the film seems to suggest that, perhaps, what matters is the performance, the expressive monologue and that "reality" is just a framework on which to hang what really matters -- acting and the performance of carefully written and melodramatic speeches.  In such a world, the "real" is subordinate to the imagined and, at the end of the film, Stephanie seems about to vanish into her own fantasies.