Saturday, the one day that’s always clear and always has the main highlights. This fest it’s Fucktoys, a 16mm pre-millennium fantasy of a prostitute, played by writer/director/executive producer Annapurna Sriram, trying to work her way into enough cash that she can pay her psychic to lift a curse on her. It’s playing in the 160-seat upstairs theater, which was converted from the old balcony a few years back, sandwiched in between $Positions and Reveries: The Mind Prison. This may turn out to have been a mistake.

The fest has incorporated a wellness center this year at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center next door to the theater, since real people need to really take care of themselves. I’m signed up for morning and afternoon yoga, but the morning class is at something like 11:15, and I skip it because I’m not done writing fast enough to get there. I barely make it to the sponsoring issues.io panel at 1, which is interesting – they’re using NFT technology to add an encryption process to movie downloads as an anti-piracy measure. They say it’ll make digital ownership easier, so people can sell their work more easily and securely. Their only market is filmmakers who haven’t broken into traditional distribution channels, mainly shorts, so they’ve sponsored the entire festival.

Tony’s there just for the presentation, not the whole festival this year, and he thinks it’s great I’ll be in the upstairs theater for six solid hours. Says he likes it better than the main theater, being stacked that close to the screen and your fellow filmgoers. I usually like being in the front row, and every seat on that balcony is, essentially, a front row seat. I work to carry that mentality into my six solid hours in the upstairs theater.

I duck out early for Removal of the Eye at the main theater, in which Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan, directing themselves as  Kallia and Ram, navigate a fussy newborn they seem eager to pawn off on each other and the mother who insists on performing an exorcism on her. Like Cherry Colored Funk in the shorts block last night, it’s heavily inspired by Uncut Gems, that signature combination of families in the apparent zenith of their self-destruction, starting from rock bottom and going as far down as they can in less than 100 minutes, every step in their descent marked by shouting matches that are treated as neutrally as possible, forcing individual viewers to choose between laughing and crying.

It’s an excellent film on a microscopic budget that brings you to that point of uncertainty and cradles you there for the duration. It becomes dissatisfying in a way, because you spend so long at maximum tension watching these awful people neglect their child that it runs the risk of becoming numbing without more plot progression points. The film was conceived and tested during COVID isolation, and true to form, they rarely leave the apartment, which keeps costs down along with the extremely limited cast. There are a lot of tricks that can pull together a very compelling movie with very limited resources. I’ll end up seeing two more movies today about which all of these things are true, and they become harder to distinguish as the night goes on. 

I step out for afternoon yoga and dinner. Matt Farmer is outside the theater to introduce the next feature documentary, Are We Good, talking to Sriram. Apparently he’d been listening to her episode on the “No Film School” podcast on a flight back from Sweden a week ago, and that’s the conversation I walked in on. He gives me a Swedish troll cross to keep other evil spirits out of my home before I pass.

All yoga sessions are completely booked, but I’m one of only four people in the afternoon – really one of two, if you discount the instructor and the wellness center coordinator. I get about two thirds of the way through the yoga, then all of the pilates, and don’t feel much outside of my hips afterward. I think it’s a good showing, but I’m glad I missed the morning session. Dinner is cheap, hearty street tacos from pre-gentrification holes in the wall where they only speak Spanish, the kind of joint that’s just as romantically run-down rural Texas as the rest of the neighborhood. I just barely have time to get another drink before getting to the upstairs theater for six solid hours.

$Positions, also heavily inspired by Uncut Gems, follows Mike Alvarado (Michael Kunicki), a blue-collar Midwesterner in dire life circumstances who’s become addicted to gambling on cryptocurrencies. This one is structured more as a contemporary myth, with every scene set up as parable and most other characters idyllic in how they present choices to Alvarado. This film seems to encourage judgment of its lead in a way that the others don’t, but rubber-bands that back with intense, pitiable scenes of his worsening family crisis. Writer/director Brandon Daley, Kunicki and several other members of their team are on-hand to make it clear the whole thing was and remains a joke. 

There’s a rhythm to it, which quickly becomes a physical groundswell within the stacked audience. Alvarado has his phone set up to notify him when his crypto holdings increase or decrease in value, which happens basically every minute. He spends entire scenes staring at his phone, his mind completely threaded to the wildly shifting number in his balance. As a gambling addict who views every second as a gamble, every moment he spends looking at that precious number is another fix.

His mood is tied to the number as well – he can swing from wildly rich to dirt-poor, in theory, without anything within his control happening, and he lets his moods swing just as wildly as his holdings. Every time we hear his phone chime, there’s a nervous, unified sigh, as we know he’s about to be ripped from depression to mania or back, without any self-awareness afforded to the people watching him do this.

Fucktoys is the obvious highlight of the festival. This must have exploded in popularity after they’d already set the schedule, because it’s a fire drill to turn the theater over. As we leave $Positions, there’s already a line out from the entry, all the way down the stairs and almost out the main entrance, and fest organizers labor to fill every seat they can. Volunteers move up and down the line, making sure everyone already has a ticket, the complex layers of ticketholders, VIP pass holders and rush lines coming into play. I’m able to break away down the haunted staircase, which gives me enough time to get another drink before getting to the back of this monster. It takes about 20 minutes to file us all in. Matt Farmer, whose seat I’ve been saving, makes it in on a miracle, saying he’s the last person they let in.

Fucktoys is also heavily inspired by Uncut Gems, and specifically feels like a female version of the movie we’ve just seen. Alvarado’s addictions and his responses to them reflect a masculine fantasy, one where his risk-taking is rewarded and he not only saves the day, but is proven right doing it. His methods of feeding this habit are also masculine – he increases risk, pulling his special-needs brother out of daycare for the deposit money, selling the house, accepting money from gangsters. These are by no means gallant things, but they do serve the gendered fantasy – I’m a man, I need to make it work, and going deeper into the hole is what I need to do to make it work.

AP (Sriram), similarly, is addicted to psychic readings, reflecting a polar-opposite feminine fantasy in which she has no control of her fate, but must keep paying the tarot readers to warn her about it in increasing detail. She feeds the habit with sliding-scale sex work, going from a reliable older client in a dissatisfactory marriage to increasingly dangerous circumstances. Most of the film is spent wandering the rural town with her crush, Danni (Sadie Scott).

Advertising itself as a set in an alternate universe before the turn of the millennium, Fucktoys is a much wilder and more ambitious period piece than the other films we’ve seen today, with the bubblegum soft filters and delicious costume and set design, very much Midnight Cowboy meets The Love Witch. There’s a lot of historic queer cinema woven into the film.

After three straight movies that seem like riffs on Uncut Gems, forgive me, but we’re going to write a bit about Uncut Gems and how these films make repeatable formula from the Safdie brothers’ instant classic.

They all hinge on a deranged lead performance from a character driven by his compulsions, be it staring at his crypto wallet or a crystal ball; comparable supporting performances so it doesn’t just look like Jackass; a constant stream of high-intensity scenes, usually shouting matches or grossouts. We got two straight movies with a urine drinking scene, for example.

There’s a very high technical floor. There has to be a distinctive, professional look in order to be taken seriously. The dialogue and editing have to be effortlessly perfect. The score, usually synth-heavy, has to step up and carry some entire scenes. None of these movies make pulling a great movie together look easy, but they do make it look possible.

I make it through the first half hour of Reveries: The Mind Prison, a very different film. It’s an abstraction, more of a concert with a visual element, but six hours is a long time, and I wander off to the bar.