Bastian Günther’s fascinating new film, One of These Days, explores human desperation and the cost of consumer culture through the microcosm of a small town’s yearly competition, run by the local car dealership.
For a small town in Texas, the longstanding endurance competition is welcome entertainment. If you are lucky like Kyle Parson (Joe Cole), your name is selected from one of the many sign-up boxes dotted around town. The prize? A brilliant, sky blue pickup truck that looks like it costs tens of thousands of dollars. If you aren’t so lucky, you enjoy the hype and hysteria building up to the big day, attend what seems to be the wildest party of the year (along with most of the town) and pop by when you can to gawk at the poor fools losing their minds holding onto a car in the unbearable heat for days on end.
Bastian Günther masterfully unveils the sinister and deeply worrying reality of modern entertainment, focusing on our obsession with suffering and pain by cracking the cheery veneer of a ‘good-natured’ local competition. What once seems to be the pinnacle of a cute, small town’s social calendar, quickly devolves into something far more hellish. By the end, you have it all: violence, vomit and vitriolic twins that could star in their own horror movie.
On paper, it seems simple enough; it seems harmless enough, too. Host a competition once a year where anyone can enter, names are drawn fairly and everyone has an equal chance to win. There’s no knowledge or privilege needed, no money or education that can get you further ahead. Just sheer determination. Yet beneath the façade of a nice, local event is a far more sinister desire, one that no one sees until it’s far too late. For in truth, the real draw to these sorts of events, the reason they bring in such big crowds and spread so well on social media is that while we all want to win, more than anything, what we want to see someone else lose.
In us all is a desire to see people struggle, to see them fight and to see just how desperate they are to win. Much like the townspeople who pop by the event to cheer on their favourite entrant, we want to pick a hero to cheer for, a villain to jeer at and to be entertained by the disappointment-fuelled outbursts of everyone else involved. For the ugly truth is that there is a part of us all, hidden deep and tightly squashed, that wants to be comforted by the knowledge that they, like us, failed to achieve greatness.
Günther forces the audience to face this reality within ourselves by confronting us with his seemingly ordinary, ‘oh so innocent’ characters. From the organisers, to the contestants and audience members, no individual commits an obvious wrong in One of These Days, and yet all are so clearly guilty of encouraging the madness which eventually ensues. The bloodshed and wasteful loss of life we are forced to witness initially seem so bizarre and unexplainable in this slow-paced drama. However, even the briefest recollection of the film’s events will leave you stunned by the obvious solution to the evil that has taken place. And at the centre of it all: a sky blue pick-up truck that represents so much more than just a nice prize.
A slow burner, without a doubt, One of These Days is beautifully shot and cleverly written. It is for those who want a thought-provoking film which will entertain as much as it challenges, and which will leave you with feeling both admiration and shameful fear.
One Of These Days releases in cinemas from April 1st. Head here for more information.