Drib // Every You, Every Me // Late Shift
Adam's Notes for July 23, 2026
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Hey gang,
Hope your summer is going well. I had planned on writing that we’ve been smoke free here in my little corner of the prairies, but then the smoke rolled in a day or two ago. No bueno. But it’s not nearly as bad as the rest of the continent, I think. Sorry about that.
This week I’m looking at some films I’ve watched recently. I haven’t seen Nolan’s Odyssey yet but I suppose I’ll have to soon. I am kind of hyped for it. I’ve been getting ready for it by listening to a bunch of podcasts where Daniel Mendelsohn is the guest. That guy’s great. I used to love the ancient world. I still do, but I don’t spend much time there. These days it’s always the Renaissance. Which is a fun place, because to really get it you have to be willing to dip in and out of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, not to mention the medieval world. It’s fun!
But the movies I’m looking at this week are contemporary. No costume dramas or anything. I enjoyed them. I hope you will, too.
P.S. Issue six of Saros is out now. It’s got four great stories, one each by Sheldon Birnie, Susan Morritt, David Kloepfer, and Marisca Pichette, plus tons of great art by Finn Matthews. You can download a copy here for as little as free. And Saros’s mothership publication, Fusion Fragment, is currently open for submissions. If speculative fiction is your thing, be sure to check it out and consider sending us a story. We’re getting swamped with AI crap but there’s some good stuff, too.
DRIB (2017)
Directed by Kristoffer Borgli
Starring Amir Asgharnejad, Brett Gelman, Adam Pearson
90 minutes
An Iranian-Norwegian comedian with a penchant for doing oddball media stunts begins making viral videos of himself picking fights and then getting beaten up. The fights seem real and he lets on that they are, but they’re all staged with friends. He gets invited to go to Los Angeles to do an energy drink guerrilla marketing ad campaign, the idea being he will recreate the fights for an ad campaign that couldn’t possibly air, but which will be leaked to the media, giving the company a lot of what’s called ‘earned media’ in politics. Things don’t quite work out. There’s supposed to be tension from the guy withholding the fact that he faked his fights, but what does it matter if the ad campaign is also fake? Brett Gelman plays a great asshole, and Adam Pearson (the guy with the face deformity from Under the Skin) turns out to have comedic chops, and there’s an interesting Brechtian distancing: it’s presented as a fictional film about the real events with documentary-style segments that pull back from the world of the film. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as funny as the director’s follow up, Sick of Myself, one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time. Still, I want to check out the Borgli’s more recent Hollywood films The Drama and Dream Scenario.
Every You, Every Me (Alle die Du bist) (2024)
Directed by Michael Fetter Nathansky
Starring Aenne Schwarz, Carlo Ljubek, Youness Aabbaz
108 minutes
What a ride this was. So a woman gets called to an industrial workplace, like a lignite mine or something: her husband is in trouble. He’s locked himself in a room at his job interview, because he panics in exam scenarios. She goes to comfort him, but it’s not an actor she comforts, it’s a full-grown bull. Then in the next shot as they leave the room and confront his would-be co-workers, her husband becomes a child actor, a boy. And then out in the car he’s an old woman, a grandmotherly type, and then also a young guy in his twenties, and then, finally, a man her age, in his forties.
These alternate representations of the husband repeat throughout the film, really capturing the way people change as you see them in new light and also how difficult it is to reconcile different aspects of a person. Even the alternates have dual natures: the boy is childish and impulsive, but also curious and innocent, etc.
Meanwhile, the wife works at a sort of mechanic shop, repairing mine vehicles. The company is trying to restructure and she’s becoming a leader, trying to talk her coworkers into rejecting the shitty severance package on the table. The film has flashbacks in a different aspect ratio, showing how the relationship has evolved over the years: husband and wife used to work together, but he lost his job over a panic attack. At first it seems she’s a stereotypical battered housewife (in the earliest flashback she lives with her daughter in a motel, going night by night; then she has trouble making eye contact at work), and maybe that was true in a past relationship, but with her husband it’s sort of a gender-swapped dysfunctional family from the 50s: she’s holding things down jobwise but it’s so emotionally draining that she confesses she doesn’t feel anything for her youngest daughter, and they realize she’s fallen out of love with her husband.
She acts out, in little ways at first, but eventually you realize how volatile she is too, how her husband is managing her emotions so she doesn’t upset the kids or make a scene in public or among her co-workers. The film ends with a climactic confrontation on the first day of his new job, he’s having another exam panic attack and she’s no longer stable enough to help, seems to be gearing up to leave him. So many questions. Not least among them, why are there so many dramas set at lignite mining operations? And why was the film funded by Port au Prince (okay so it turns out this is a German production company’s logo, not the capital of Haiti).
Late Shift (Heldin) (2025)
Directed by Petra Biondina Volpe
Starring Leonie Benesch, Alireza Bayram, Jürg Plüss
92 minutes
Sort of a stress film akin to Anora or the work of the Safdies, but with a more straightforward plot, a core of empathy, and some really tender, beautiful moments. A nurse works in a nice Swiss hospital, but like everywhere else, it’s understaffed. In fact, the closing credits tell us just how many nurses Switzerland and the world will be short of by 2030 (I noticed a large discrepancy between the onscreen text and the subtitles, so I’m not going to repeat the numbers here). The nurse we follow, Floria Lind, played by Leonie Benech of The Teacher’s Lounge, is extremely competent, but there’s only so much she can do, she can’t be in two places at once, she complains, and we spend a lot of time waiting for her to inevitably make a mistake. I couldn’t get into The Pitt but I really liked this. There’s very little drama aside from the work. I imagine if you work in healthcare you’ll find the film boring. It’s cool seeing her silently work all the medical devices and preparing serums and medicines, it doesn’t tell you what she’s doing but get the gist of it. An action film about stuff that happens every day.
More movies:
Re: Adam Pearson, he's fantastic and deeply funny in A Different Man from a 2024, the best part of an otherwise pretty-good film about deformity/performativity etc. Borgil's Dream Scenario also has its moments and is worth checking out, but is most memorable to me is that they shot a couple pivotal scenes at my local watering hole.