The Scary Of Sixty-First
Red Scare's Dasha Nekrasova makes a film about the intoxicating power of feeling better than everyone else
This feature was written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program, but with the festival line-up changing due to COVID, The Scary Of Sixty-First didn’t screen so it didn’t make sense to put this on the MIFF blog just yet. Here it is for now on my basically abandoned Substack (sorry, I decided I don’t like writing for free, even as a bit). The film should stream in Aus/NZ on Shudder later this year.
My mentor Philippa Hawker helped me work through my many feelings about the film and edited this piece too. She’s the best, and I can’t recommend Critics Campus enough.
On August 10, 2019, Twitter, for possibly the first and last time, was in agreement: convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who had been found hanging in his Manhattan jail cell, did not kill himself. The conspiracy theory became both a fait accompli and something much more powerful: a meme.
In the immediate aftermath, actress, writer and podcaster Dasha Nekrasova wrote, directed and starred in her first feature film, The Scary Of Sixty-First, a black comedy about twentysomething friends Addie (Betsey Brown) and Noelle (Madeline Quinn) who move into an Upper East Side apartment formerly owned by Epstein and used by his clients.
A day later, the two are both possessed: Addie, seemingly by a 13-year-old girl who died in the apartment, while Noelle becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth of Epstein’s network after an unnamed woman known as ‘The Girl’ (Nekrasova) barges into the apartment for her own investigation. Noelle and The Girl team up to ‘research’, which largely revolves scrolling through the internet while on amphetamines: in co-writing The Scary, Nekrasova and Quinn were reflecting on their own Epstein-induced spiralling.
“My character in the film, her obsession with the Epstein saga was very true to my experience of it,” Nekrasova recently told The Saturday Paper. “...It was a fantasy of control, and I think I just felt so, so out of control.”
The film’s nimbleness — they began shooting in January 2020, five months after Epstein’s death — is nothing new to Nekrasova, who is best known for co-hosting Red Scare, a podcast that weighs in on the week’s cultural controversies while often creating its own. Since Red Scare began in 2018, Nekrasova and her co-host, writer Anna Khachiyan (who cameos in Scary as either Ghislaine Maxwell or a lookalike), have been labelled as leading voices of the “dirtbag left”, a group of podcasters who deride ‘identity politics’ and political-correctness, expressing a frustration at the capitalist-hollowness of liberal culture.
While the duo have continually offended people for their unapologetic use of slurs, criticisms of both the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter social movements, and allegations that they promote eating disorders, they currently make almost AUD $60,000 a month from subscription service Patreon, where they post irregular bonus episodes.
It’s not the ghost of Epstein or his victims that haunts Scary, but Nekrasova’s notoriety. Reviews and coverage cannot help but reference Red Scare, and criticisms of the film — that it’s in poor taste, an incoherent mess of ideas that’s more concerned with being provocative than providing ‘insight’ — echo criticisms of the podcast.
And as with the podcast, Scary’s fans wouldn’t necessarily disagree. The Scary Of Sixty-First is intentionally combative, made with the same love of the incendiary that saw Red Scare release ISIS-themed merch. (Scary’s use of ableist and homophobic slurs and the insult ‘cuck’ will be familiar to listeners, too.)
The Scary also runs on a manic logic: just as Noelle and The Girl run with anything that could be considered a clue to Epstein’s death, The Scary Of Sixty-First is a grab bag of references. Its plot recalls Polanski’s The Tenant, while scenes and characters are pulled from Possession, Eyes Wide Shut and American Psycho. The slow zooms, odd camera angles, film grain effect and Eli Keszler’s anxiety-inducing score are pure giallo. This is all paired against vocal-fried mumblecore dialogue and apathetic acting, save for any scenes involving sex —including, when Addie is possessed, a frenzied masturbation scene featuring countless tabloid photos of Prince Andrew.
There’s a mimetic glee here to the references, thanks to the playfulness with which The Scary either copies or modifies them. Rather than using horror tropes to manufacture fear or tension, The Scary pokes fun at its characters’ doomed fates — despite their Vynasse-fuelled rants, Noelle and The Girl make absolutely no tangible progress in uncovering the truth to Epstein’s death. There is no agency here, other than convincing themselves of their agency.
Instead, things, as Jessa Crispin wrote in a scathing review for Another Gaze, ‘just happen’. The film, too, offers no grand insight into Epstein or the perversion of powers that fascinated Nekrasova: instead, the film captures a desperation to gain not necessarily any specific knowledge about Epstein, but the giddy high that comes with getting ‘it’, whether a conspiracy, meme or power itself.
Prior to Scary, Nekrasova’s most defining work in film was 2018’s Wobble Palace, which she starred in and co-wrote with director and regular collaborator Eugene Kotlyarenko. The film details the breakdown of a dysfunctional relationship between two Bernie Sanders supporters and LA creatives on the weekend before Trump’s 2016 election. In one scene, Nekrasova’s character reveals her biggest fear is “being basic” before an online quiz confirms that her love of Uggs and brunch makes her just like everyone else.
This desperation to be above the masses is the guiding philosophy of not only Nekrasova’s character in Scary, but also of the film and of Red Scare. Being basic is to be a cultural and political sheep, powerless to effect any change let alone having the sense of self-respect to know you should demand it. Behind Scary’s abrasiveness is a pervasive rage - and a boredom at continually feeling that rage — not limited to or even particularly interested by Epstein’s crimes.
It is the same energy that pulses through Red Scare, as the duo dissects how the week’s liberal ‘discourse’ misses the mark (whether the topic is Demi Lovato, NFTs or Palestine), explaining how the true oppressive forces of class are mired by pop-activist outrage.
The Scary Of Sixty-First details not only how conspiracies offer a way to separate your life from the sleeping masses, but captures how liberatory it can feel to flirt with risk.