Mark Reviews Movies: STANLEYVILLE

Stanleyville, Oscilloscope Laboratories

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 21, 2022

A group of eccentric characters participate in a strange and increasingly sinister competition in Stanleyville. It's obvious that co-screenwriters Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, who also directed, and Rob Benvie have some bigger ideas in mind with their relatively simple premise, but the various oddities on display take away the focus from that potential.

The central of the five, peculiarly named contestants is Maria Barbizan (Susanne Wuest), an office worker who abandons her job, her husband, her home, and her belongings after watching a hawk fly into a window at work. While wandering a mall, she's approached by Homunculus (Julian Richings), who offers her a chance to compete for a new car.

Arriving at a loft, Maria meets the other contestants. Andrew Frisbee Jr. (Christian Serritiello) is a wealthy businessman and the heir to a large corporation. Bofill Pancreas (George Tchortov) is involved in a pyramid scheme that sells protein power, and he's addicted to his supply. Manny Jumpcannon (Adam Brown) is an actor/musician/model waiting on his big break, and Felicie Arkady (Cara Ricketts) really, really wants that car.

Homunculus, the seemingly disinterested and entirely disorganized taskmaster, has a series of challenges for them—some as simple as seeing who can blow up the most balloons in a minute, others as complicated as building a telecommunications device from scratch, one or two that could have fatal results. The games seem random (for a reason that more or less becomes apparent in the movie's final moments) and are mostly unimportant.

The crux of the story is how these characters compete. Andrew and Felicie are cutthroat players, with the former seeing everything as a business transaction and the latter being just as amoral—albeit without a system to even attempt to justify that philosophy. Bofill is too obsessed with exercise and his regular protein intake to care much about what's happening between his fixes, and Manny is incompetent, even at cheating.

Maria is an empty vessel of sorts, which makes her both ideal—because her perspective has no influence on the underlying ideas—and frustrating—because there's intentionally nothing to her—as a main character. At one point, she builds a two-way radio out of a conch shell, and the voice on the other end seems to intimately know how these characters can succeed and why they want to win. Just like the anonymous advisor and many other elements here, Maria remains an unanswered mystery that keeps at us a distance from the point.

That point, perhaps, is how much of a society based on material things and economic competition defines the people who are a part of it. Beyond that, uncovering the deeper meaning and direct purpose of Stanleyville feels like one of the movie's weird, incomprehensible tasks.

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