There’s no mistaking a Joel Potrykus movie or a Joshua Burge performance. In the 2010 Super 8 short “Coyote,” 2012’s Ape and the 2014 feature Buzzard, the director and his favorite actor completed an “animal trilogy” forging a two-man subgenre that fueled ‘90s adolescent anxieties with a starkly original tone. Potrykus’ latest, Relaxer, ramps up their absurdist elements, putting Burge in a scenario that comes off as if Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett were fed a diet of Nintendo and pizza.
Set in 1999, the movie opens on dysfunctional siblings waiting out Y2K with video games, VHS tapes and an irregular food supply. Cam (David Dastmalchian) has ordered his little brother Abbie (Burge) not to get up from the couch until he completes a video game and/or food related challenge – drinking a gallon of room-temperature milk, say, and making it past Pac-Man level 256.
So what’s the problem? That set-up is a teenagers’ dream, and was in fact Potrykus’s. But the director explains that this is “the nightmare version of my fantasy.” Abbie, trapped in a hopeless family dynamic, spends nearly the whole movie on the couch. He’s not allowed bathroom breaks, which naturally leads to scatological issues. But these are not mere potty jokes; getting to the essence of teenage fantasy, Potrykus reveals how horrible and humiliating such arrested development is. While keeping Abbie glued to the couch by a paste of his own bodily fluids is as much social commentary as it is uncomfortable dramedy, his situation is so absurd that it doesn’t beat you over the head with a message.
As disgusting as Abbie’s situation is, holed up in a tiny, decrepit apartment and so thirsty that he stars to mop up the sweat from his shirtless torso, at least one scene in Relaxer is visually gorgeous. After his abusive brother disappears and an unhelpful bro-buddy brings a two-liter bottle of cherry cola only to taunt Abbie with it, a former co-worker (Adina Howard) comes to visit, and it’s like the scales fall from the movie’s crusty eyes. Cinematographer Adam J. Minnick paints this unlikely pair with the warmest hues in the film as the sun sets on their lost souls. Still, there’s no sentiment here, and any measure of kindness can’t wake Abbie up from his self-imposed night terror.
Finally, it’s up to Burge to carry the premise, and he does, making it clear as always that, while Potrykus doesn’t exactly want you to root for his characters as if they were conventional underdogs, he still cares for them. Like a feral Buster Keaton, Burge is tough but vulnerable, bravely spending the whole movie in just his underwear and pancaked layers of what one hopes is simulated bad hygiene. His expressive long face looks like something out of the Civil War, and Potrykus has consistently created roles that place his haunting daguerreotype-ready mug in the horrors of a very different fin-de-siècle.
Relaxer, like all Potrykus’ work, takes place in a very specific modern era, and Burge’s face-out-of-time makes video games and ATMs seem like so many technological prisons. Its unpleasant anti-drama is not for everybody, but it’s a fascinating exercise in profound discomfort.
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