Couched in the hustle and bustle of a Manhattan Christmas season, The Scary of Sixty-First is an equal-parts exercise in conspiracy-theory paranoia and art-school fuckery. Ho-ho-ho-hum.
String-bean roomies Addie (Betsey Brown, Assholes) and Noelle (co-writer Madeline Quinn) score an oddly affordable apartment, complete with two levels, bloody mattresses and one rat-infested ham in the fridge. Growing tension between the friends escalates after an unnamed and unannounced visitor (Dasha Nekrasova, TV’s Succession, making her directorial debut) drops quite the truth bomb: “Something extremely sinister happened in this apartment.”
That is this: The place was owned by financier/pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who utilized it as “some kind of orgy flophouse.” Mumblecore, meet Pedobear.
As Noelle willingly gets entangled in the visitor’s rabbit-hole internet research of Epstein’s considerable misdeeds and mysterious death behind bars, Addie shows signs of possession by one of his underage victims. Just as those sex-trafficked survivors had to wonder what on Earth they’d gotten themselves into, so may the Scary of Sixty-First viewer as Addie is compelled to furiously masturbate at the stoop of Epstein’s townhouse, even fingering the negative space of the metal “E” on the wall (Later, Addie commits unspeakable acts upon souvenir trinkets of the royal family featuring Prince Andrew.)
It’s not clear whether Nekrasova intended these transgressive scenes as terror or camp, yet I felt embarrassment all the same for Brown, no stranger to willingly humiliating herself onscreen. At least she can act, which cannot be said for front-of-camera newbie Quinn, whose presence registers somewhere between monotonic and blank. Although her rhetorical, likely improvised lines provide the film’s best seconds — from “What kind of loser would fuck somebody in a twin bed?” to especially “Why does Ghislane dress like a fucking nutcracker?” — a performer, she is not.
In the opening sequence, Nekrasova capitalizes on the inherent evil of gargoyles and other statues adorning the borough’s buildings, promising something special that never arrives. By the time she appears at the apartment door to kick off a second act, her grip gives way, and the film flies off the rails. Condemning the male gaze as she actively courts it, Nekrasova seems unsure where to take her tale, so the climax acknowledges word-for-word cribbing from Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. In the end, The Scary of Sixty-First proves as refreshing as the warm White Claw downed by Quinn on moving day. —Rod Lott