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Dec 18, 2015 By Michael Wojtas Web Exclusive

Popular wisdom maintains that we can’t go home again, but in his newest and most accomplished feature, Stinking Heaven, writer/director Nathan Silver suggests that many of us can’t help but instinctively return to our roots, no matter how poisonous said roots may be.

Minutely budgeted and resolutely lo-fi, the film is set in a sober living house in 1990 New Jersey. As with Silver’s preceding efforts such as Uncertain Terms and Exit Elena, Stinking Heaven observes the behavior of a closed society that mutates into a makeshift family, typically at the expense of individuals’ needs and desires. If the filmmaker’s views on personal freedom are skeptical at best, his dissection of family dynamics—nuclear and non-traditional, alike—is unsparingly bleak. While critics may fixate on Stinking Heaven as a drug film, Silver doesn’t try to make any outsized statements about addiction or sobriety, and instead explores the way these states of mind alternately act as binding and destructive forces for toxic relationships.

This manifests most literally in the case a father and daughter who are both addicts, though it extends to a web of ill-advised romantic entanglements. Like a true budding cult leader, the home’s founder, Jim (Keith Poulson), uses his marginal power as leverage in parallel relationships with a pair of disciples. The house is also, rather transparently, his last line of defense against being absorbed into a dispiriting working class lifestyle. Ann (Hannah Gross), the newest and least loyal inductee, shows up to get close to a former lover, then stays for no other reason than to antagonize those around her.

Others are there primarily to indulge in juvenile whims and stave off adult responsibility; one especially petulant character has seemingly joined simply to have a backup band for his hippie-ish acoustic drivel. Worse still, those who have come to the house out of a genuine need for help and are manipulated, greeted with indifference, or bullied. When not preoccupied in dismal arguments and misguided relationships, the group’s activities consistent of childlike sing-alongs, disturbingly under-thought therapeutic exercises, and the peddling of a fermented tea of dubious legality and alcohol content. Punctuating these scenes of vacuous lifestyle experimentation with sudden bursts of violence, Silver arrives at a tone that recalls the enduring Altamont documentary Gimme Shelter, which captured a feeling of would-be utopianism soured by preventable tragedy.

In an inspired (and no doubt economical) aesthetic choice, Silver has employed the clunky, bleary, and all but extinct Betacam to capture the housemates’ cloistered, living-all-over-one-another lifestyle. The 4:3 aspect ratio is a natural fit for the claustrophobic spaces inherent to this festering breed of suburban destitution, and Silver and cinematographer Adam Ginsberg make the most of their camera’s lurching movements and generally nauseating atmospherics. Prismatic lensing is used to communicate both the ecstasy and delirium of Ann’s highs, while a gradual zoom inching in on her alone at a diner recalls the voyeurism and desolation of an Edward Hopper portrait. Elsewhere, a slow crawl across a queasily patterned carpet at a funeral rather pointedly recalls the consummate family horror film, The Shining.

Relative to Silver’s prior films, Stinking Heaven takes a more amorphous, intuitive approach to narrative. Rather than fixating on a single protagonist, the focus drifts from character to character (it’s worth noting that key cast members Poulson, Gross, and Deragh Campbell received writing credits). As the story weaves through a series of entrances, exits, petty disappointments, and irreversible personal disasters, there’s the sense of a cumulative despair being passed amongst individuals, or perhaps of a malignant growth slowly polluting every limb of this family tree.

Silver has previously shown a talent for writing trenchantly funny dialogue, but this is perhaps his first film in which ever line serves to reinforce his core concerns. Even a seemingly throwaway bit about Jim’s cousin attempting to weasel his way into the house in order to meet women registers as incisive, as it’s closer to Jim’s own motivations than he would likely admit. Some quips are situated in bitterly risible Alex Ross Perry territory (“Do the world a favor—don’t have children”), though others bypass pungency, and are taken to absurd endpoints. Precipitating as it does a grisly incident of bleach consumption, a monumentally insensitive bulimia joke just might be a cinema first: sarcasm that’s probably admissible in court as a means of manslaughter.

Amongst the most savage scenes are those in which housemates perform videotaped reenactments of their personal low-points. Staging these moments between the emotional overlap of nervous laughter and panic attack, Silver appears to be taking aim at the communal, do-it-together aspects of scrappy independent filmmaking. When Jim whines for the others to bring a certain amount of “earnestness and enthusiasm” to the group’s vapid treatments, he could almost pass for an upstart, Sundance-pandering filmmaker. Situated in any excessively sincere festival lineup it somehow managed to infest, Stinking Heaven would stand out not just as contrarian, but scathingly confrontational. It’s a suffocating experience, unrepentantly cynical and in wretched taste. And more power to it.

Author rating: 8/10