★★★
Chris Marrs Piliero’s debut stitches together a handful of deepfake revenge tales with pulp energy and lurid carnage – but while stars Aaron Holliday and Paige Searcy shine, indulgence, contrivance and pacing keep it from greatness.
Chris Marrs Piliero builds his debut feature Appofeniacs (it means “people who draw connections,” among other things) out of a handful of short stories about deepfake revenge and tries to stitch them into one universe. At its centre is Duke (Aaron Holliday), a glue-sniffing loner who discovers how to weaponise deepfake technology. His meddling spirals outward, dragging in a range of others: a woman driven into paranoia by falsified footage, a flamboyant schemer chasing his own payday, a pair of would-be vigilantes who think they can set things right.
The design echoes Pulp Fiction with its broken chronology, circling cameos, and the sense of a mosaic gradually taking shape, and indeed much of the film feels indebted to Tarantino, from a rant about tipping etiquette to a room full of weapons to LA hipster gunmen and a literal DVD of Django Unchained (plus some plot-centric references to the n-word). But where Tarantino’s film felt expansive, this one depends on so many overlaps and contrived connections that the world shrinks and begins to feel rigged. The intent is to show how small actions reverberate, but the stitching leans so heavily on coincidence that it starts to feel forced.
The opening stretch is the hardest to take. Characters scream over one another until dialogue turns to static, and the sheer noise makes it difficult to grasp what is happening. Indulgence becomes the ruling mode: scenes run long, self-conscious references pile up, and momentum falters. Cut half an hour and kill a few darlings, and there might have been a sharper picture.
The cast keep the project afloat – Aaron Holliday makes Duke, the glue-sniffing deepfaker at the centre, manic and dangerous, and Paige Searcy brings a vulnerability that cuts through the chaos and leaves the strongest impression. Sean Gunn relishes his role, but it is Holliday and Searcy who emerge as the standouts.
As it moves forward the film steadies. Marrs Piliero’s music-video instincts give the editing a restless pace, and the soundtrack keeps it loud. Violence is staged crudely but with impact: weaponise superglue and cherry bombs, plus a cosplay blade far too large to wield (or is it?), leave bodies ruined in ways designed to get a midnight audience shouting.
When the chaos finally tips into outright carnage, the film finds its truest register. The closing sequence is outrageous, loud, and gleefully destructive, every gag and body blow delivered with the precision of a festival crowd-pleaser. Heads are smashed, weapons swung, and the screen fills with the kind of grotesque invention that leaves an audience howling. It is over the top in every sense, but also where Piliero’s excess finally pays off.
Appofeniacs is indulgent to the point of incontinence, yet it improves as it runs. Beneath the clutter and coincidence is a leaner film that never quite gets free. This would’ve been better with about 30 mins cut out, and some of the Tarantino reference darlings killed. But what remains is unruly, gaudy, and sometimes gripping, a carnival of digital-age paranoia.
Appofeniacs played at Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX
Whitlock&Pope 