Mark Reviews Movies: WYRM

Wyrm, Vertical Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 9, 2022

Wyrm, the feature debut from writer/director Christopher Winterbauer, began as a short, and the filmmaker's struggle to expand one potentially clever idea into a 90-minute movie is awkwardly apparent once the central idea runs its course. There's clearly more to and behind that premise, but in shifting gears so quickly, Winterbauer confirms that the confusion surrounding the key component of this story isn't simply on us. If the screenwriter has established some back story and logic to this world in his mind, he has decided to keep it there.

The world of this movie is both familiar—for those who grew up during the 1990s, at least—and slightly off-kilter. It's a time of bulky personal computers, the advent of mainstream accessibility to the internet, boom boxes and cassette recorders, and a certain type of fashion. Everything seems more or less normal and nostalgic, except for one key difference: Our protagonist, the teenaged Wyrm (Theo Taplitz), has a collar around his neck. An electronic sensor flashes a red light every few seconds, as its transmitting or awaiting some kind of signal.

Indeed, it is, as we soon learn. Every child of a certain age, sometime before puberty hits, begins to wear one of these collars. When a kid has his or her first kiss, the device detects that somehow, and the collar detaches. It's the first stage of an individual's sexual development, according to some vague and never-explained government or educational program, which ensures that kids have a certain level of sexual experience before going into the work force or something like that (There's a brief reference to vocational education upon one's first experience with intercourse). If one doesn't ask any questions, Winterbauer will kindly offer no answers.

The story does revolve around Wyrm, who's the last kid in his class to still be wearing a collar, and his desperation to join the rest of his age group in their progression toward adulthood. It also includes Wyrm's twin sister Myrcella (Azure Brandi), who recently had a—let's say—digital experience with a boy, leading the next device, attached to a person's wrist, to detach.

The two siblings share a bedroom, and now that Myrcella is technically a woman, she wants the room to herself. Wyrm can take over the bedroom that once belonged to their older brother, who died in a car accident. While Wyrm is trying to convince anyone—a younger kid, anyone who will take his money, and especially Myrcella's new friend Izzy (Lulu Wilson)—to kiss him, he's also preparing a series of interviews with people who knew his brother for a memorial service at school. The only adult support for any of this comes from his uncle Chet (Tommy Dewey), who takes care of the siblings while their mother (played by Rosemarie DeWitt) is on a thousand-mile hike and their father (played by Dan Bakkedahl) is either working or working through a persistent case of constipation in the bathroom.

Some of this is borderline absurd, while almost all of it played with a sense of emotional detachment, and that approach certainly fits the initial gimmick of Winterbauer's world and story, which see sex as some social stepping stone and a matter of passionless biology. There's some amusing stuff here, as Wyrm tries to buy or manipulate his way into having a girl kiss him, including unintentionally taking a page out of the book of an infamous serial killer. There's a limit to this, not only in that the driving force of the plot comes an early end as soon as Wyrm does receive a kiss, but also in that Winterbauer is hazy on the details of this program. It exists solely as a gimmick and a gag here, and the intrigue and humor of it only go so far.

As for the other major idea here, it has to do with grief and the lengths to which people will go in order to avoid it. The detached tone of the movie, then, fits in a certain way, since the family is trying to evade the fact of a member's death and, perhaps, something grimmer about their feelings toward the older brother (It gradually becomes apparent that he wasn't the shining role model everyone now says he was). Apart from Sosie Bacon's presence as the dead brother's girlfriend, though, Winterbauer seems to dodge the very concept of conflicted grief that he starts to confront.

There's simply too much evasion and deflection happening in Wyrm—from its half-cooked and quickly dismissed dual conceits to the basic approach, which favors quirky nostalgia over any kind of sincerity. The movie is so conflicted about what it wants to do that there's almost no telling what it wants to say.

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