Keren Cytter's new feature film is an unapologetic look at broken interactions

Artist, writer, and filmmaker Keren Cytter doesn’t particularly like cinema. She doesn’t care much for the art of acting either. Remarkably, this makes the New York-based Cytter one of the most intriguing artist-directors presently in the niche art film sector, an experimental genre at the fringes of the already niche arthouse cinema. She prefers her actors “to not act”, as she told STIR, and instead maintain a certain rhythm when delivering their lines. And yet, throughout her successful career in the art world, Cytter has trained her camera on her extended circle of acquaintances and friends—some of whom are professional actors—to create an impressive, fast-growing body of work, anchored in the medium of film.

Her latest feature-length work, entitled The Wrong Movie, premiered at the 74th Berlinale—Berlin International Film Festival between February 15-25, 2024, in the ‘Forum’ section which spotlights non-commercial filmmaking. With a production budget of only USD 25,000, The Wrong Movie is possibly one of the lowest-budget films featured, pushing the envelope of how uncommercial the section can get. Save for two scenes, the entire movie takes place indoors, inside New York apartments that have known better days. Two of the female characters, Angel and Nicole, live in the same converted 19^th century building that had been originally built as a prison. They also hire the same cleaner, Rob, a sex addict in recovery, who recognises the building’s historic purpose when he notices that Nicole is communicating with another neighbour through the bathroom pipes—something he saw inmates do at New York’s notorious Rikers Jail when he worked there.

We could pause here to unpack the metaphors in these last two sentences alone—the ruminations they invoke about isolation, mediated faceless communication, the notion of feeling trapped and burdened with baggage—but we haven’t even gotten to the rest of the cast yet. This is a perfect example of how Cytter writes screenplays: they are dense, referential and pregnant with meanings and symbolism, yet minimalistic, acerbic, deadpan and delivered in the most unaffected matter-of-fact manner. Angel is a food vlogger (in one scene, baby spinach gets tossed in the air for the camera) who’s still hung up on her ex, Alex, an emotionally manipulative tech influencer who makes unboxing videos and who broke up with her for being “too white.” All Angel can hold onto is a drone that Alex has just unboxed as she returns to her current boyfriend, John, a struggling actor with a drug habit. The metaphors pile up with each character, we are introduced to: Nicole, for example, carries the ashes of her dead father in her leather shopper, along with the trauma of abuse and a loaded iPhone that turns into a gun.

Timur, a drug dealer, is Alex’s brother, and Nicole ends up in his apartment after her father’s cremation. Timur still lives with his mother, who has a knack for leopard-print tracksuits and mayonnaise. Nicole and Timur consume drugs together in his bedroom, and what follows is a tender dialogue, underscored by the dreamy synth-pop of Berlin-based musician Dan Bodan, who scored the film. The two characters envision what their perfect romance would look like: “I’d stop with the drugs and dedicate my life to you,” says Timur. “We’d run away together, leave our pasts behind.” Then, they kiss. “Nothing,” says Nicole. “No sparks,” adds Timur. The dream is over.

“I tried to focus less on the form and more on forming characters,” Cytter told STIR. “I looked at my older work and didn’t like it so much. I thought it was too complicated. I’m now trying to focus on simplifying my work and focus more on characters and emotions.” In the film’s final scenes, all the characters but the mother (cue absent parent metaphor) end up in the same apartment, including Alex’s drone, as though they were seeking comfort in each other’s familiar presence. However, the comfort is short-lived; a gun introduced into the plot earlier must be fired, as the Chekhov principle goes. “I wanted everything to go the wrong way and also the characters should feel wrong,” Cytter told STIR when asked about the film’s title, The Wrong Movie. “What’s more, I felt that everything I was doing was done the wrong way.” Although coming from Cytter, who is not interested in making grand cinematic gestures as a director, screenwriter and editor, this statement should be understood to mean precisely the opposite: she did everything exactly as intended.

‘The Wrong Movie’ will be screened at the Beverly Hills Film Festival, U.S., and at the FFAVM—Festival de films d'auteur de Val-Morin, Quebec, Canada, from May 1–5, 2024.