#jennifir nicholich

[anhed-nia]

NOT BLOGTOBER 10/20/2022: ZO IN EXILE

When I read the description of Dylan O’Keefe’s compact, low budget indie project ZO IN EXILE, I developed a certain image of it in my mind:

“Zo and friends venture off for a weekend getaway to a cabin in the quiet town of Exile, New York. But a bucolic vacation turns grim when Zo's friends, fueled by debauchery and excess, plunge her into a fantasy world of frenzy where her only escape is to come to terms with her own destructive nature. Or else face the music of eternal madness.”

Between this summary and the movie’s poster, featuring lead actress Shiho Matsuoka’s pained expression as she gazes into the void, I came to expect a grim, agonal psychodrama about the sadomasochism inherent in human nature. I had set myself up for a big surprise. ZO IN EXILE defied my expectations several times from being to end, the experience of which is so pleasing that I hesitate to describe what happens in it to others. It would be better to go in knowing as little as I did. But, if you insist on coming prepared, I’ll do my best to explain it.

The first seed of ZO IN EXILE was sown when filmmaker Dylan O’Keefe and his fiancee and producer Jennifir Nicholich started joking about the prodigious mop Dylan had grown during the pandemic, aping the end of THE WIZARD OF OZ: “And you were there, and you were there, and you were there, and you were—HAIR?!’” The gag eventually evolved into one of ZO’s central villains, a sentient, man-sized, blade-wielding wig that pursues Zo through her own version of Oz. In saying this much, I’ve already given you a taste of how bonkers ZO IN EXILE is, but like THE WIZARD OF OZ, it begins in a very familiar place.

Zo (Shiho Matsuoka) joins her friend Jack (Adrián Burke) and horny couple Jacob (John DiMino) and Judy (Madeleine Ours) for a getaway at a cabin in the woods. The shy, sensitive protagonist’s unease with her companions’ hard partying seems to forecast an EVIL DEAD-like fate for them all—and let’s face it, EVIL DEAD is a popular thing to imitate for young filmmakers on a microbudget. So, if you’ve seen any amount of homemade horror movies, you might feel like you know what you’re in for. O’Keefe is counting on it: “It’s been done a hundred thousand times, it’s very easy to shoot… So I kind of wanted to follow that cliché, and then trail off into Alice In Wonderland.” Initially, Zo is more threatened by her so-called friends than the cosmic horror that haunts the cabin, as “nice guy” Jack joins the group effort to get her hammered so she’ll be more vulnerable to him, and Jacob physically isolates her, knocking her out. Zo doesn’t consciously experience what so obviously happens next, as she plunges into a dream state that at first resembles a karaoke video.

This “follow the bouncing ball” musical sequence is the first hint we have that the world of Exile is collaged out of various forms of popular media that make up our collective subconscious; some viewers have noted similarities to HAUSU, TOO MANY COOKS, and Wonder Showzen, but O'Keefe's influences are more mundane. In her dream state, Zo meets the otherworldly Landlord (Tee Sudderth), a deceptively maternal woman with a malicious wig, who sends our heroine winking in and out of parallel universes resembling early silent films, TV commercials, sitcoms, and YouTube tutorials as she tries to find her way home. After inducing a false sense of familiarity with its EVIL DEAD pastiche, the insanity of EXILE escalates rapidly, and against all expectations, it becomes extremely funny. In its most startling episode, a Tiktok influencer has her phone stolen mid-video, and we join the phone on a breakneck race through the subway system where it meets a grim fate. The best special effect in the movie is really O’Keefe’s editing, which creates a rhythm that suits both horror and comedy.

“I want to do something I didn’t have to really care about, that I could try to not be such a perfectionist with,” the filmmaker says of a film that he is careful to insist was made just for fun. ZO IN EXILE was shot and assembled over two years of the pandemic more or less as a diversion, but as zany as it is, there remains something personal and quietly intense simmering beneath its surface. A particularly hilarious scene involves a predatory telemarketer (Noam Harary) from Great Northern Wellness and Insurance, Innovative Products, Brokers & Adjusters who tries to scam an isolated old lady named Helen, but she’s seen so much shit in her time that there is no beating her. The scene goes from comical to oddly sobering, before transitioning to a scene of Zo wandering through a seemingly endless graveyard that blends perfectly into the Manhattan skyline, giving the impression that the city and the cemetery are part of the same continuum. O’Keefe explains this sequence: “The whole idea was, my mother is a hospice worker, and unfortunately the elderly are very disposable (in our society). The telemarketer is trying to grift this person at the end of her life; if there’s a dollar to be made, it will be.”

Dylan O’Keefe credits his bright, hardworking mother as a major influence on him, which makes it unsurprising that ZO IN EXILE is dotted with potent female characters. The Landlord finds a parallel in the caretaker Biandbi (Debra Toscano), an amusingly passive-aggressive Italian-American lady who ropes Zo into the film’s most dreamlike scenario. She entices Zo to help her tend to a beehive inside an antique trunk, explaining, “If the hive has a violent queen, the hive is violent. If the hive has a gentle queen, the hive is gentle. I have a violent queen…you must be the gentle queen.” Besides being excitingly weird, the scene also puns on Zo’s longed-for home in Queens, and also the multiple queen-like figures in the story. As our heroine, Shiho Matsuoka plays it deadly straight, which has the effect of making the funny scenes even funnier, and the moving moments more affecting. If there were even a whiff of sarcasm or irony about her, ZO IN EXILE wouldn’t work the way it does, with its strange undercurrent of sincerity.

The strong, independent women aren’t the only abstractly autobiographical element in the movie; perhaps its most striking image is of a burning piano (with incredible live sound), which happens to be the exact instrument on which the filmmaker learned to play as a youth. O’Keefe laughs off this strangely poignant inclusion by noting, “During the pandemic when work was slow, I became a volunteer firefighter. I’m a bit of a pyro, I like to light shit on fire—sorry, Chief! But I’m lapsed now, I haven’t volunteered for six months.” The real thing to learn from this beat is that you don’t need to be spoiled for resources in order to make a really surreal and visually striking movie; you just need an open mind and a little gumption. OK, maybe a lot of gumption, especially if you’re trying to make something unusual that people don’t yet know they'll want to see.

What I’m trying to say is, you DO want to see it, because there’s no other way you’ll believe it. Check it out tonight (10/27) at 10pm, and this Saturday (10/29) at midnight at the Film Noir Cinema in Greenpoint. If your friends are foolish enough to miss it but you don’t know how to describe it, point them to this review and maybe that’ll help. Maybe.