‘Stress Positions’ Review: Pandemic-Era Disaster Gays Provide More Cringe Than Comedy | Sundance 2024

Stress Positions, the first feature from writer-director-actor-composer-editor Theda Hammel, isn’t concerned about being likable. The setting — New York City at the frightening start of the coronavirus pandemic in the spring and summer of 2020 — is already likely to turn some viewers off. Fortunately, this is one of the better movies to directly address the pandemic, though admittedly that’s not saying a ton when most filmmakers won’t touch this subject matter with a ten-foot pole and the short list of films dealing with that time period includes utter schlock like The Bubble. Maybe audiences are finally ready for more involved pandemic movies: four years on from 2020, with COVID-19 in yet another major surge that the government and media is doing its best to ignore, seeing a movie where some people are actually wearing masks feels like an oasis of sanity.

“Sanity” is not a word that would otherwise come to mind when thinking about Stress Positions’ cast of characters. Almost everything fascinating, funny, and frustrating about the film stems from its focus on people who might affectionately be referred to as “disaster gays” if any of them warranted any affection. There’s only one main character who could be described as likable — the young Moroccan-American model Bahlul (Qaher Harhash) who’s still figuring out his (her? their?) identity and is only spending time with the other characters due to a broken leg and a familial connection. Bahlul’s story, elaborated on through voiceover narration in the film’s middle acts, is the closest Hammel’s more caustic film comes to the sort of heartfelt coming-of-age story you’d stereotypically imagine when hearing the phrase “Sundance comedy.”

Though Bahlul is Stress Positions’ most sympathetic viewpoint character, the protagonist is Bahlul’s uncle Terry Goon (John Early), a gay, not-quite-divorced, never-employed hypochondriac and former Hitchens-style antitheist who can barely care for himself, much less a nephew he’s both jealous of and casually racist towards. Simply put, he’s The Worst — though the same could also be said, for different reasons, of his philandering predatory husband Leo (John Roberts, Linda from Bob’s Burgers!), his manipulative alcohol-stealing trans lesbian friend Karla (Hammel, who narrates the opening and closing acts), and Karla’s strung-up and artistically exploitative writer wife Vanessa (Amy Zimmer). These characters are not depicted as classy or sexy in the manner of recent queer villain favorites like Lydia Tár or Tomas in Passages — honestly, they’re not even villains so much as just utter losers. These people are easy to hate, but they’re also people whom anyone involved in the LGBTQ+ community has certainly encountered in real life, if not uncomfortable reflections of your own selves. If the cast of Stress Positions is not the representation everyone wants, it’s probably the representation we deserve.

Where this gets really interesting and provocative is in looking at this spectrum of the community’s worst from the perspective of a religious Muslim who’s almost certainly some letter of the acronym but, when faced with this array of ignorant losers, has to wonder whether his convert mother was on to something with her religious homophobia. Essentially, this is a movie for gay people who hate gay people (for reasons only gay people would understand). Karla claims she hates gay men so much that it was a reason she transitioned to being a trans lesbian, though her and Vanessa’s respective acts of extreme shittiness don’t make gay women (trans or cis) come off any better either. Mixed in with all of this are a series of running gags about just how ignorant these white queers (though Karla insists she’s Greek, which is “less white”) are when talking about the Middle East — for one thing, Morocco is not in the Middle East.

These running gags are among the more consistently funny material in the movie. More comedic highlights: The cover of Vanessa’s book is a pointed American Fiction-esque jab at the sort of novel that would be winning awards 5-10 years ago; you don’t even need to hear any details to figure out why Karla hates it because, in this case, you really can judge a book by its cover. Jokes about mask-wearing always have to tread a fine line with the risk of minimizing a real issue people still don’t take seriously enough, but when the masks Terry obsessively begs people to wear are World War I gas masks, it feels safe and appropriate to laugh at the visual. Side characters like Terry’s silently spying MAGA landlady Coco (Rebecca F. Wright) — “she’s not trans, she’s mentally ill” — and a man listed in the credits as “Friendly Neighborhood Lunatic” (Gordon Landenberger) who’s loudly anti-theft and pro-pornography add some more absurdist humor to the mix.

In the end, however, the cringes outnumber the laughs in this particular brand of cringe comedy. As its title implies, Stress Positions is more than anything a stressful experience, with little in the way of relief in its final act beyond hints of hope in the form of Bahlul’s journey of self-discovery. It ends up being a little overwhelming and not in a very enjoyable way, though it remains involving even at its most annoying thanks to its unique perspective and artfully done editing. This will not be for everyone. If it’s even partially for you, however, it will manage to hit hard in enough places to make you curious what else Hammel has in store for us in the future — even if her first movie is just too uncomfortable to ever consider watching a second time.

Grade: B-

This review is from the 2024 Sundance Festival. Stress Positions will be distributed in the U.S. by NEON.