I know, you thought you were done with the pandemic movies by now. But based on the early reviews out of Sundance for Theda Hammel’s anxiety-fueled comedy Stress Positions, maybe there’s room for one more. The film is set during the COVID outbreak of 2020 and centers on a bunch of anxious Brooklynites, with John Early leading them as Terry, who our review Cortland Jacoby described as “a broke millennial, living out the final days of his marriage in his estranged husband’s rundown partyhouse.”
Others in the cast include Qaher Harhash as Terry’s Moroccan nephew Bahlul, a gorgeous model convalescing after an injury; Hammel plays Karla, a trans massage therapist in a bad relationship with Vanessa (Amy Zimmer) who wrote a successful book exploitative of Karla. Hammel also co-wrote the script with Faheem Ali, who appears in the film as a Grubhub driver. John Roberts appears as Terry’s soon-to-be ex-husband Leo, who has moved on and is galivanting around the world mid-pandemic.
In her review from Sundance, Cortland said “If experimental farce is a genre, then this film is the definition of it.”
Stress Positions opens in theaters April 19th courtesy of NEON.
SYNOPSIS: Terry Goon (John Early) is keeping strict quarantine in his ex-husband’s Brooklyn brownstone while caring for his nephew — a 19-year-old model from Morocco named Bahlul — bedridden in a full leg cast after an electric scooter accident. Unfortunately for Terry, everyone in his life wants to meet the model.
