A guy with a bag on his head can play out a couple of ways. The Unknown Comic went for laughs. Recent films such as "The Orphanage" and "The Strangers" go for straight scares. And then there's the new indie film "Baghead," in which the sack holds both chuckles and screams.
Written and directed by brothers Jay and Mark Duplass, "Baghead" is part of a growing collection of movies made by an interconnected yet geographically dispersed group of filmmakers and is the first in the group to be released by a studio-connected distributor, Sony Pictures Classics. It plays tonight and June 27 as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival and has already started opening in smaller markets. Some lump these films together under the nebulous heading "mumblecore," but what they are really a part of is an emergent wave of new American independent filmmaking.
Coming on as a scruffy gadabout in order to mask a deceptively sophisticated structure, "Baghead" mixes and matches the loose talk of indie comedy with the roundhouse scares of a horror film. Two friends (Steve Zissis, Ross Partridge) persuade two women (Greta Gerwig, Elise Muller) to head to a cabin in the woods to make a movie in a single weekend. Everyone has their own agenda, but when it seems they are being stalked by someone or something with an unsettling bag over its head, all plans go awry. There is something ridiculous -- pathetic even -- about the villain, and yet it is surprisingly effective.
"Mark was particularly obsessed with horror films because of how they move so fast and how they just rule the audience," said Jay Duplass a few days after the film's premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
"One time we were driving at night, it was kind of creepy out there and he was like, 'What's the scariest thing to you?' The answer came up, a guy with a bag on his head looking in your window. We left it alone for a while but then it kept getting us. It's so stupid and simple, but it's freaky."
Shot on digital video in 23 days for very little money -- "rental cabins in East Central Texas aren't that pricey," said Jay dryly -- the film is part of the Duplass' ongoing exploration of structured improvisations. They work out a detailed outline for the story and then give the actors leeway with the dialogue. They fully light their sets so they can shoot any angle of the scene as it happens, with the roving eye of a documentarian.
