Mark Reviews Movies: SPREE (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 13, 2020

The first and third acts of Spree give us a pretty solid thriller. In the first, we immediately see a young man who is obsessed with becoming internet famous and, then, gradually learn just how far he's willing to go in order to achieve that goal. The third act mostly presents events from the perspective of one of the young man's targets, and with the previous knowledge in hand, there's real suspense in watching the target realize how big of a mess she has become ensnared.

As for everything in between, director Eugene Kotlyarenko and Gene McHugh's screenplay suffers both from repetition and the erroneous belief that we want to spend so much time with the protagonist who becomes a villain and, finally, an antagonist. The character, a socially awkward and unstable guy who starts killing people in order to have a livestream go viral, is essentially a dead end in terms drama. Once Kurt Kunkle (Joe Keery) kills his first rideshare passenger, that's the end of his development as a character. Everything that happens to and with him after that is just repeating the same, old point.

Most of this movie, though, follows Kurt, who rarely hits double-digit views whenever he posts a video online. Kotlyarenko does a neat trick at the beginning of the movie, presenting Kurt's online content in a quick-fire montage. The impression of this onslaught of videos, in which Kurt just records himself going through the dull parts of his day or following some kind of trend (reviews, pranks, etc.), is that our protagonist is some kind of known entity online. Why else would anyone document their life or offer such wide-ranging content if nobody else was watching?

There's something instantly pathetic about the character, then, when he confesses that his ideal career has hit its nadir and that he finally has realized it (Kurt records this video alongside a highway and has to keep restarting his speech every time a car passes). His final chance for fame will be a project called "the Lesson," and if it doesn't work, it at least will be the definitive end of his public life.

From the start, Kotlyarenko and McHugh show themselves to be smart about how to present this tale. We get the foundation of the character immediately and especially from Keery's performance. With a dead-eyed stare, Keery's Kurt stutters through internet lingo, calls to like and subscribe to his channel, and malapropistic turns of phrase. Ironically, in playing this dull and personality-free character as well as he does, Keery shows himself to be an engaging and charismatic actor. If he weren't, there'd be no reason to watch such a vacuum of a character at all.

The filmmakers are smart, too, in slowly unraveling the goal and details of Kurt's plan. It seems like any other day, as Kurt gets in his car, with a lot of cameras installed throughout to see every angle of the interior, and starts picking up passengers. We know he has a plan. We know it involves bottles of water. We see one customer drink from one of those plastic bottles and apparently pass out. Then, we're back to Kurt, although the unconscious or dead passenger has disappeared.

The next customer, almost as rude (but nowhere near as racist) as the first, allows Kurt the chance to explain to us what he's doing. He has poisoned those water bottles, and he's hoping that beating the record of how many people a rideshare driver has killed will make him an online sensation.

From this point on, we really wonder why the filmmakers are still bothering with this character. Do they have anything more to say about Kurt's obsession with internet fame? No, they just keep showing us Kurt poisoning or otherwise killing passengers (repeatedly running over one, letting guard dogs at a junkyard maul another two, and taking an electric drill to another), while he gets excited about how many views such acts will nab him (The joke is he's so boring that nobody cares about even this). As a shocking satire of fame-seeking internet culture, the point is made quickly. As a study of the inherent entitlement of a guy like Kurt, it's mostly an excuse to keep trying to shock us about how far this satirical representative of fame-seeking internet culture is willing to go.

Things improve significantly, though, when Kurt sets his sights on well-known stand-up comic Jessie Adams (Sasheer Zamata), who just barely escapes becoming one of his victims. Kurt doesn't understand why she's famous and he isn't. Maybe, he imagines, he can leech off her fame by killing her at a comedy show.

The movie re-discovers its stride in the third act, as we watch Jessie living her life, getting ready to perform, and making a big speech about how harmful living for the online world can be—unaware that there's a murderous stalker keeping tabs on her online and inching ever closer to her in real life. Kurt falls into the backdrop, becoming just this sinister presence of unearned entitlement run rampant, and that, perhaps, is exactly where he belongs—as a character and, more importantly, as a far more pointed statement about a guy like him. Kurt isn't a star (An epilogue showing him becoming a twisted legend, though, is chilling). Spree knows this fact but can't quite fully accept it.

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