Sour Minnows brings body-snatching weirdness to Fantasia

Sour Minnows made its world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival with the kind of image that tends to stick: six men on an empty Los Angeles street, face down, licking the pavement, according to Variety. The Sour Minnows Fantasia bow introduced Harrison Atkins’ second feature as a surreal comedy built around roommates, groceries and a very unpleasant thing in yellow.

The film follows Ricky, played by David Brown of Jury Duty, and Tepper, played by Chase Williamson of The Guest. Variety reported that the pair accidentally cross into another plane of existence during a routine grocery trip, dragging Ricky’s girlfriend Aura, played by Red Rocket actor Suzanna Son, into a string of stranger and stranger events.

The menace in the movie is called “The Yellow Thing,” according to Variety. Its trick is a nasty one: it temporarily takes over Ricky’s skin and wears him.

What is Sour Minnows about?

Sour Minnows is described by Variety as a hangout movie with a body-snatching twist, centered on two roommates whose everyday errand opens the door to a different reality. The film mixes friendship, dislocation and grotesque supernatural imagery rather than following a standard genre path.

Atkins, whose previous feature was 2015’s Lace Crater, told Variety that the project grew out of frustration with trying to get a larger Los Angeles movie made. He said he had written roughly 40 drafts of another unusual script, had actors attached and kept running into slow progress and financing resistance.

In the interview, Atkins described meetings where potential backers responded positively to the script but said they could not fund it. That led him to consider what he would make if he were not trying to shape a film for sale.

The answer, he told Variety, began as poetry. Atkins said the material first ran about eight pages, then expanded into more than 80 pages and became something between a poem and a screenplay. He eventually felt compelled to make it, despite uncertainty over how the oddball form would become a movie.

Why did Harrison Atkins make it so strange?

Atkins told Variety that he is drawn to movies that make the medium feel young and capable of sensations that other art forms cannot reach. He pointed to painter Edward Hopper’s idea that if something could be said in words, there would be no reason to paint.

He also said he tries not to over-explain where his images come from. In his telling, the film’s supernatural and off-kilter elements arrived as part of a search for a feeling created by clashing meanings.

Atkins told Variety the movie may reflect the post-pandemic moment, especially through alienation between friends, people experiencing reality differently and individuals being separated into personalized internet feeds. He said those ideas entered the movie through an intuitive writing process rather than through a traditional three-act structure.

The filmmaker also said he enjoys hearing viewers try to describe the movie because he does not quite know how to describe it himself. Variety reported that Gersh is handling worldwide sales for Sour Minnows as the film looks for distribution.

This story draws on original reporting from Variety.