The Scary of Six­ty-First – first-look review

There are films that are bad. There are films that are so bad they’re good. Then there are films like The Scary of Six­ty-First which, in their ill-con­ceived irony, breeze straight past ​‘so-bad-it’s‑good’ to pre­vi­ous­ly unmined depths of repugnance.

This is the debut fea­ture from ​“dirt­bag left” icon Dasha Nekraso­va, who is best known for going viral defend­ing social­ism while dressed as a sailor, as well as the pod­cast Red Scare which she co-hosts. The premise is designed to shock and intrigue: two Man­hat­tan room­mates are liv­ing in a for­mer ​“orgy flop house” of Jef­frey Epstein’s when one becomes pos­sessed by the spir­it of one of his ado­les­cent victims.

The film is osten­si­bly an out­ra­geous trib­ute to 1970s psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror like Dario Argento’s Sus­piria and Roman Polanski’s The Ten­ant, but it miss­es that mark so wide­ly the result is an abhor­rent car crash filled with dia­logue so ter­ri­ble most of it resem­bles the intro­duc­to­ry expo­si­tion from porn.

There are seri­ous moral and eth­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions when you cre­ate art about a real-life tragedy, in par­tic­u­lar one where many of the sur­viv­ing vic­tims are still seek­ing jus­tice. Yet the glib lev­i­ty of The Scary of Six­ty-First makes it noth­ing short of obscene. Nekraso­va is cap­i­tal­is­ing on child abuse and seem­ing­ly finds her own brave­ness to ​‘go there’ hilar­i­ous. The expe­ri­ence of watch­ing the film is like being trapped in a con­ver­sa­tion with a ​“cool girl” telling bad rape jokes then accus­ing you of being uptight for not laughing.

The only moti­va­tion of the dia­logue seems to be to shock the view­er by hav­ing char­ac­ters hurl homo­pho­bic slurs at one anoth­er or call the Queen a ​“bat­ty old cunt”. A woman suck­ing her thumb while hav­ing sex with her boyfriend and yelling ​“fuck me like I’m on a plane!” and ​“fuck me like I’m 13!” isn’t sub­ver­sive, it’s cheap and tedious.

Nekraso­va demon­strates a degree of cine lit­er­a­cy by evok­ing gial­lo in her use of magen­ta light­ing, and Eli Keszler’s synth-heavy score elic­its some great B‑movie moments, but the film has a fair­ly loose grasp on the most basic mechan­ics of sto­ry­telling, sus­pense and humour. Above all, this is proof that no amount of pos­sessed-woman-mas­tur­bates-with-Prince-Andrew-mem­o­ra­bil­ia scenes (and there are quite a few) are a sub­sti­tute for basic script-writ­ing skills.