Night Visions: Black Eyed Susan

There isn't a single happy answer in Black Eyed Susan, the new ultra-low-budget movie from director Scooter McCrae. In fact, I'd argue there aren't any happy questions, either, which is the point. It's an angry and devastating bit of misery that makes its mark by demanding its audience to smartly engage with uncompromising material at every turn.

Derek (Damian Maffei) takes a job with Gill (Marc Romeo), a tech bro in the market of highly evolved sex dolls. As with any technology devised by men and involving the female form, Gill works to make his dolls more vulnerable and durable to extreme sex acts – with the caveat that deep down, somewhere in the programming, they too enjoy it. He gives a whole speech about how it's really for the good of society. After all, if you can take out your frustrations and kinks on a robot, you won't take them out on anyone real.

If you went "hang on" at any point just now, congratulations, you can see through the bullshit. It's not a solution to a problem, but a permission for depravity.

From the outset, McCrae wants us involved, engaged, and to not look away. The very first scene, where a stilted man beats and limply fucks Susan (a tremendous Yvonne Emilie Thalker), sets the tone for what's to come. It's ugly and brutal and not for everyone. Which does make the film difficult to recommend. There's an intense and valuable conversation it wants to have with its audience, but it's so uncompromising in the way it does it, that I can see how it will drive others away. At times, I wanted to tune out as well.

McCrae's aesthetic replicates the sleazy 90s VHS-boom, when everyone with a camera set out to publish their demented visions onto a blossoming market. It's a magnificent sleight of hand that puts us at unease from the start. There's something that feels icky about the way old VHS-tapes look. Perhaps it's everything we saw at the time that's left its mark.

Whatever the reason, McCrae's vintage look and feel heightens the tension and underlines the message: None of this behavior is new. We've always found a way to use new technology for abuse.

From there, McCrae and his game cast provoke and question the audience for every second of the tight 80-minute runtime. This is not a film with answers, which is to its benefit. That would be reductive and simplistic, and Black Eyed Susan understands this isn't the place for either.

Instead, it leaves us with a story that feels like a retelling of Greek myth. A perversion of beauty and sancitity. Like other great cyberpunk stories in recent years, (most notably Ex Machina), Black Eyed Susan is at its best when it heightens reality to absurd and uncomfortable lengths to reveal truths about our broken society.

In that regard, it's an unnerving triumph. But I wouldn't recommend it for everyone.