CRUMB CATCHER - Mark Reviews Movies

Crumb Catcher, Doppelgänger Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 18, 2024

Ultimately, Crumb Catcher is a thriller, revolving around a disastrous wedding, blackmail, a home invasion, and the eponymous invention, which its creator, a waiter at the reception for the aforementioned wedding, sees as a way of diminishing the usefulness of his current job. Basically, it's a glorified dustpan that attaches to a table, allowing restaurant patrons to use the attached broom to sweep up their own crumbs. It's a pretty pointless and unappealing invention, obviously, and as the jokey center of writer/director Chris Skotchdopole's debut feature, it's also the key to how the filmmaker approaches this material.

This is, in good part, an odd and awkward comedy, even though there is an air of the sinister surrounding everything that happens here. The balance between that comedic tone and the mechanics of a tightly plotted thriller works quite well in Skotchdopole's hands, mainly because the humor and the suspense possess an equal degree of discomfort.

We're uncomfortable from the start, upon first meeting the newlywed couple, Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck). He's a writer, whose book inspired by his childhood and his troubled father is about to be published. She works at the publishing house that will distribute the book, and as they pose for photos at the reception, the tension between them is palpable. They argue about everything, and it's not too long before we start to wonder how this relationship lasted so long to arrive at marriage and how long the marriage itself might last.

Things are bad for the two from the beginning of the story, and they only become worse with each successive development. Shane gets blackout drunk at the reception, leaving Leah to organize gifts and such in the morning. There was a misunderstanding about the wedding cake topper, leaving Leah to have a lengthy conversation with a waiter whose perceived helpfulness is overbearing. It doesn't help when that waiter, named John (John Speredakos), comes to talk to the couple while they're waiting for Shane's old car to be able to start. Shane's a bit too polite to a man whom Leah just said was an annoyance for her liking.

There's at least a little lull in the bickering after the couple arrives at the remote, lavish home of Leah's boss, who is letting them stay there for a little honeymoon. It doesn't last long, because Shane decides he doesn't want his book published and Leah thinks that decision would have a disastrous effect on both their careers. He's worried people, including Leah and her friends, are only interested in the book to look down on his father, and if her hesitant and half-hearted response is any indication, he might have a good point.

This relationship seems doomed on its own, in other words, and Skotchdopole's attention to the dynamic of the couple feels like a self-contained drama. Without us really noticing, though, he has laid the groundwork for the real tension here, by way of that waiter and a mysterious text message Shane receives while on the road to the house. The sender later messages him with a video attachment, showing what Shane did with a random woman while drunk on his wedding night.

When John shows up with the cake topper and the ulterior motive to pitch his ridiculous invention to them and another hidden goal, Shane and Leah find themselves figurative hostages to an eccentric man who doesn't know when he's not welcome. As soon as the uninvited guest introduces his business partner Rose (Lorraine Farris), Shane realizes he's more of a literal sort of hostage in this situation.

The specific details of how this scenario proceeds, of course, must be left unsaid at this point. Skotchdopole gives the escalation of the stakes a baked-in logic, based on Shane's guilt—or fear of being caught or both—over what happened the previous night, Leah's tough-minded attitude and unwillingness to put up with these strangers' nonsense, Rose's hardline business tactics, and, obviously, the very particular and peculiar man John is.

Speredakos' performance here is quite the accomplishment. In John, here's a man who's pathetic to his core—socially unaware, desperate in every fiber of his being, the kind of guy who genuinely thinks patrons of any restaurant, let alone the wealthy ones who would go to the kind of fancy place he wants to sell his invention to, would be eager and willing to clean up their own mess. The man's a joke, and much of the humor on Skotchdopole's part is in juggling the absurdity of this character with the circumstances of his visit, more or less forcing Shane to accommodate John and his silly, ill-conceived dream.

The real achievement of both the film and Speredakos' performance is how things shift, when John realizes his plan is failing and that everyone sees him as a joke. There's more to the particulars that are best left to be discovered, obviously, but there's genuine excitement in watching this scenario transform from a weird comedy of manners into a legitimate thriller, in which the threats are real and cunning, while still being just off-beat enough that the material remains tonally consistent.

Skotchdopole knows exactly what he's doing here in terms of how both the comedy and the suspense elements arise from a shared kind of troubling embarrassment. With Crumb Catcher, he has crafted a unique thriller that allows us to laugh in discomfort until we're just downright uncomfortable with how far one character is willing to take matters to stop the laughter.

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