83 min | NR | February 24, 2023 | IFC Films
Dev gets out of a recovery meeting and decides the cure for his life is stopping his ex-girlfriend from committing murder. He tears across a locked-down New York to save her from a plan she may not even have. The cause is a fantasy, but the panic is real.
Dev sprints through a locked-down New York City with a manic plan to win back his ex-girlfriend. He is fresh out of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and convinced that stopping her from killing the man who wronged her will fix everything. Daniel Antebi turns this errand into a fever dream about addiction and the stories addicts tell themselves to justify the next bad decision. The film is not about love. It is about a man who mistakes his own chaos for purpose and drags everyone around him into it.
Ben Groh plays Dev with wild, sweat-soaked desperation that never lets up. He delivers long stretches of dialogue directly to the camera, breaking the fourth wall to narrate his own unraveling. Groh keeps Dev sympathetic and exhausting at the same time. Dion Costelloe plays Luca as the steadier counterweight, the friend who keeps showing up even when there is no reason to. Liz Caribel Sierra plays Regina, the ex, with a guarded calm that exposes how much of Dev’s mission exists only in his head. Jared Abrahamson plays Russel as the target of the plan and gives the film a streak of menace that grounds the absurdity.
Antebi writes and directs his first feature with a restless visual approach that matches Dev’s mental state. He cuts to animated interludes and shifting aspect ratios to externalize the panic running through his protagonist. The camera chases Dev down sidewalks and through subway cars in handheld bursts that rarely sit still. The empty pandemic streets become a character, turning the city into a hollowed-out maze that mirrors Dev’s isolation. The editing favors momentum over clarity, which is the right instinct for a story built on a man who cannot stop moving.
The energy is the achievement and also the limit. Antebi front-loads so much velocity that the back half cannot escalate further, and the film starts repeating its own pulse. Dev’s spiral is vivid and specific, but the destination matters less than the running. This is a debut that announces a filmmaker with ideas and the nerve to throw all of them at the screen. It does not yet have the discipline to decide which ones deserve to land.