Mark Reviews Movies: THE BETA TEST

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 4, 2021

The promise is simple: Two people meet anonymously in a hotel room, and from there, anything goes. The suggestion isn't that anyone and everyone would take advantage of such an offer for allegedly consequence-free sex with a complete stranger. The implication is that a guy like Jordan (Jim Cummings), a Hollywood agent facing the existential career crisis of stronger guilds and the cultural reckoning aimed at hostile work environments, definitely would make a good show of pretending to be conflicted—and then pretending to face some kind of moral crisis after the fact.

The guy is a great pretender. That's the running joke of the screenplay of The Beta Test, written and directed by both the star and PJ McCabe (who also plays a fellow agent, who, for balance, is a good husband and loyal family man). As for Cummings, he has recently hit a solid stride in his career—writing, directing, and starring in independent comedies that revolve around his ability to play awkward, flawed, and unstable men, trying to cling to a sense of power that only exists in their imagination. He continues that trend with this film and this performance, which gets him out of a police uniform and into an expensive suit that would probably be drenched in sweat, if Jordan actually possessed a conscience.

Cummings is, as he has been in his previous filmmaking/acting efforts, great here—playing a man who, despite how often he flashes his teeth, has probably never made an authentic smile in his life. The smile comes as a job requirement, whether he's wooing a potential client or trying not to make a big deal of the fact that said client randomly grabs his genitals at a party. Jordan has to keep smiling. If he weren't so egotistical and destructive, we might view this story as a tragedy.

It certainly seems to start that way, as a random married couple is about to face a relationship-ending crisis. The woman, preparing for the husband to react violently, preemptively calls the police to report a domestic disturbance at their apartment. She tells the husband that she received an invitation in the mail, making an offer for her to meet an "admirer" in a hotel room for sex.

The wife accepted the invitation, went through the deal, and now realizes that she wants out of the marriage—not for money or to personally attack the husband, but simply so that she can start a new life on her own. She was right to call the cops ahead of time, but the inevitable violence that occurs in this scene is so calmly executed, with a blink-and-you'll-miss-it matter-of-factness, that it's genuinely, shockingly upsetting.

Cummings and McCabe are smart to include this scene and to make it as horrifying as it is. There are other moments of violence and murder as the story progresses, serving as a reminder of the potential stakes for our far-from-admirable protagonist, but as soon as Jordan receives a similar invitation in the mail, there's a sense that things could go terribly wrong for him at any moment.

Well, they could, if Jordan decides to accept the offer to have sex with a secret admirer behind the back of his fiancée Caroline (Virginia Newcomb)—and if Caroline is the kind of person who might react in such a way. The facts that we're not sure, since the entire film is seen from Jordan's perspective, and that Jordan does worry about that potential fate, as he reads and hears about more cases of partners and spouses murdering their straying partner/spouse, are subtly telling.

Jordan assumes he's so charming, loveable, and generally great that he would be worth the moral and legal trouble of murder. The reasonable, less arrogant assumption would be that Caroline would get over it and just move on with her life without him. That's not how Jordan thinks, though, and the allure of random sex—not just with a stranger, but with an "admirer," which is an important distinction for a narcissist like him—is pretty tempting.

Cummings and McCabe's screenplay tries to connect to this temptation and this general mindset to the evolving culture of Hollywood—from the sexual harassment, exploitation, and crimes of powerful men, epitomized by the single name of a former movie executive, to an actual workplace where people and especially women are treated with basic levels of decency and respect. Jordan, obviously, is the kind of guy to miss those old days, just as he misses the days when he could charge writers for obtaining TV show deals for them.

The internet, human resources departments, and the courts have taken away Jordan's desire to treat women as he wants, and the union is putting an end to such predatory business practices. What does that leave a nothing like Jordan? For sure, it certainly isn't a stable relationship with Caroline, based on love and respect.

The filmmakers overreach with some of these goals, but as a setting for an environment where a self-absorbed man could have once flourished and now—rightly—feels increasingly irrelevant, a Hollywood talent agency certainly fits the bill. The same goes for the story's eventual turn into a kind of paranoid thriller of the social media age, as the source of those invitations and the "perfect" match-ups becomes a matter of algorithms from online companies collecting and selling personal data. It all makes a kind of sense, even if the whole purpose and aim of the person or people behind the scheme are a little hazy.

From a specific plot and broader thematic level, The Beta Test is admittedly shaky. As a dark comedy and an off-kilter thriller featuring a fascinatingly detestable protagonist, though, the film is admirably challenging and, yes, wickedly funny.

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