Ick

Joseph Kahn (Bodied, TIFF ’17) returns to Midnight Madness with a berserkly sardonic creature feature that riffs on classic science-fiction horror films from The Blob to The Faculty, but with a crucial subversion: what if an invading alien entity was met not with panic and fear, but cavalier indifference?

In the small American town of Eastbrook, nearly two decades after a viscous vine-like growth — colloquially referred to as “the Ick” — began encroaching on every nook and cranny, a nonplussed populus have found their lives seemingly unaffected by the creeping anomaly. The exceptions to this oblivious conformity are Hank Wallace (Brandon Routh), a former high-school football prospect turned hapless science teacher, and his perceptive student Grace (Malina Weissman), who both regard the Ick with a suspicious scrutiny that is soon violently validated. Bursts of bloody bedlam and blasé attitudes ensue, cannily satirizing how a society can grow accustomed to living in a perpetual state of emergency.

Kahn enlivens the pointed irony of this pulp horror scenario with his signature breakneck abandon and pop aesthetics. Dizzying, grotesque, and hysterical in both definitions of the word, Ick (co-written with Sam Laskey and Dan Koontz), points a cultural mirror towards a contemporary ethos that has been fomenting since the turn of this century, a premise crystalized in the film’s deployment of millennial needle drops that are as nostalgic as they are infectious.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

Content advisory: accident trauma, violence, horror, sexual innuendo