There were a few bad omens trying to tell me that my fate with the mobile Criterion Closet was a doomed one. I decided to try to get into the closet on Sunday morning, the penultimate day of its appearance at SXSW 2025. The plan was to try again for Death of a Unicorn, at it’s second and final screening, then pop across the street after that movie was over to try my luck with the Criterion Closet.
I decided to spend 20 bucks on parking, so I could avoid the lengthy shuttle ride from the Lamar Street Alamo over to the Paramount. I would be near the Paramount for a good portion of the day, after all, between the movie and the Criterion Closet. I parked, paid, then walked the couple of blocks down to the Paramount. Only the second and final screening for Death of a Unicorn wasn’t happening there. In a woeful mistake, I had read the SX screening schedule wrong (or perhaps I just assumed that one of the most anticipated screenings would be held both times at the fest’s biggest screening venue). This screening of the movie was happening at the Hyatt Regency, a mile or so walk from the Paramount.
I was irked at myself for the mistake, but I decided to just keep swimming. Providing that the number of people trying to get in wasn’t ridiculous, I had time to walk over to the Hyatt for the movie’s eleven am start time.
I covered about half of the distance on foot when I looked down and realized that the lanyard containing my fest badge wasn’t around my neck. I had left it in the car. Now even more annoyed with myself, I did some rough math as I turned on my heel to walk back the way I had come. Getting back to my car to get the badge, then turning around again to make my way to the Hyatt all before the movie started was highly unlikely. I did my best to perform triage on the situation to try and engineer the most effective use of my time. I hadn’t been to the Hyatt venue yet, so I had no idea what the parking situation was, and I didn’t want to waste my 20 bucks on 30 minutes of parking, anyway.
I decided to ditch the Unicorn screening (it was probably full to overflowing anyway, I rationalized). I would head back to my car, since I couldn’t do ANYTHING without the badge. Next, I would head back down to the Paramount, where the Criterion Closet was stationed across the street. As I turned a corner and saw the little trailer on wheels emblazoned with the Criterion logo, I saw a line of about 30 or 40 people. Not too bad, I thought. As I got closer, I couldn’t quite make sense of the way the line was constructed, so I pointed to what I thought was the end of the line and asked a volunteer if that’s where I should queue up. As if I were in A Christmas Story, the volunteer told me that the line actually jumped across the sidewalk and continued up the block. Way up the block.
The famed mobile Criterion Closet (photo by the author)
I walked to the back of the line, passing a couple hundred people to get there. The mobile closet was set up for each person in line to get three minutes inside of it, allowing you to look around and talk about your favorite titles to a camera, like they do with their more famous guests. As I looked at the line, I saw each person as three minutes. It was a lot of minutes. Each person also got a free Criterion tote bag and the opportunity to purchase three Criterion titles at 40% off at the end of the journey. (That’s not a bad deal, but I did have to chuckle at the capitalism of it all.)
The front of the mobile closet and the head of the wait line (photo by the author)
I secured my spot in line at approximately 11:15am. I told myself I would use the time I would have spent watching Death of a Unicorn waiting for the Criterion Closet. At about 11:45, a Criterion employee gave an announcement to the people waiting in my portion of the line. She told us that, while we were on the bubble, we should have a pretty good shot at getting into the closet. Only, probably not until the end of the day, when they were getting ready to close up shop, at seven pm. She then asked who would be willing to be grouped together with four other people in line, so they could get five people in and out of the closet at a time.
Get a free tote bag with each seven-hour wait! (photos by the author)
I asked what time I should show back up the following day, the last day the closet would be available, for a better shot at getting in. She told me that they weren’t opening until eleven am, and that people started showing up for the current day’s shift at four in the morning. She said if I showed up by nine, I would most likely make my way through the closet by noon. That sounded like a terrible way to spend either day, so I bid adieu to my chance of walking through the mobile Criterion closet. I’ll have to become such a famous film critic (har, har) that they’ll be forced to invite me to visit the real thing.
“Hey, kid! Just where do you think you’re going? The line ENDS here. It BEGINS there!” (photo by the author)
After the endless debacles of the morning, I decided to do the only thing that made sense. It was the only thing that would make me happy. I watched three movies in a row. I had time for SXSW shuttle shenanigans, so I made the trek for the first time this fest to Violet Crown cinema, near downtown, to watch Trans Memoria, a painfully beautiful rumination on human connection with a meta structure.
The film is the product of first-time director and artist Victoria Verseau. She’s a trans woman who spent almost a decade making the film as a way to process an immense amount of grief. During her transition surgery, Victoria made a friend in the hospital going through the same process. The two became incredibly close and Victoria was shattered when her friend took her own life after having gender-affirming surgery.
Trans Memoria is a meditative piece of slow cinema. Its title evokes a film by a master of the style, Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, which, while it shares little in terms of story, is a spiritual sibling of Verseau’s in terms of aesthetic. I was also reminded of the work of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who uses self-reflexivity in his work to explore his own life and memories. Throughout Trans Memoria, Verseau’s actors break the fourth wall to comment on their characters and the situation. One even calls out Verseau for being selfish in centering her needs in relation to her friend’s suicide. This actor is committed to the principle of “your body, your choice,” which includes, to her, the right to end one’s life if they choose to do so. Verseau has crafted in Trans Memoria a deeply felt work of personal cinema. She gives nuance to an experience that only someone who has lived through it can provide.
Victoria Verseau, the director of Trans Memoria (photo by the author)
More successful shuttle hopping took me back to the Alamo for screening two. (As long as you have one to two hours to spare to get between venues, the SXSW shuttles can be convenient, but if you’re running late for a screening and traffic is terrible, they can also be a nightmare.) Movie two was a sci-fi revenge fantasy called Redux Redux. The film, directed by the McManus brothers (and starring their sister!), is the kind of movie that wears its influences on its sleeve, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Watching Redux Redux felt like being plopped into a late ‘80s/early ‘90s James Cameron movie. It’s The Terminator, but with the multiverse and a killing machine in the form of a woman using (and abusing) her own rage as her primary weapon. The story focuses on Irene, a woman whose daughter was murdered by a sadistic serial killer. Irene lives in the only version of the multiverse that has developed technology – in this case, a sarcophagus-like metal mobile chamber – to traverse the endless possible worlds around us. At the start of the movie, Irene has been traveling to other universes for who knows how long, brutally murdering different versions of the monster who killed her daughter.
She’s also managed to kill her own humanity. Irene begins to take steps to resurrect it when she inadvertently saves another of the killer’s victims in one possible timeline. If you squint right and ignore logic issues creeping at the edges of the frame (like how on Earth Irene would be able to move her multiverse-hopping machine, which looks to weigh at least a ton, by herself in crucial moments) then Redux Redux is a bombastic, tense time at the movies.
In the directors’ Q&A following the screening, the brothers related how, when they developed the script, they took special care to explain what the multiverse was and how it worked. Then just about everyone in the movie business jumped on the multiverse bandwagon. They discussed axing most of that exposition, since the wider movie-going public now intimately knows what the multiverse is.
Redux Redux is significantly bleaker and doesn’t have the empathetic heart at the center of something like Everything Everywhere All at Once, but its brutally violent, nihilistic take on the multiverse is akin to Doctor Strange by way of David Fincher’s Se7en.
For the last screening of the day, I scooted on over to the Zach theatre for Matt Johnson’s latest project. I attended because Johnson’s BlackBerry floored me when I saw it at SXSW 2023. His sense of humor (both on display during the movie and in the Q&A after the screening) won me over. Before the breakout success of BlackBerry, Johnson was primarily known for low-budget projects shot in and around his home base of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. One of those projects was a mockumentary web series (later adapted for television) called Nirvanna the Band the Show.
I meant to give that series a look after BlackBerry, but it’s hard to track down for streaming and I failed to follow up on it. Johnson returns to his roots for his latest film, hilariously titled Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. I was nervous about being unfamiliar with the original show (I can’t even tell you why the characters spell Nirvana incorrectly), but I was worried for nothing.
You can enjoy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie without knowing anything about it. It’s like sitting someone down to watch your favorite episode of a beloved sitcom – Brooklyn Nine-Nine, for example) that they’ve never seen. We all know the conventions, and once you pick up on the personal relationships within the show, you can relax and watch twenty minutes of people acting ridiculously for comedic effect.
The basic setup is Matt (played by Johnson) and his fellow bandmate Jay (played by Jay McCarrol) are always getting into wacky mix-ups while trying to hit it big with their music. At least as far as I know. The opening sequence of the movie, in which the duo plan to sky dive from the 1800-foot-tall CN Tower onto the field of the Rogers Centre – home of the Toronto Blue Jays – in an attempt to make their wish to play at Toronto’s Rivoli music venue a demand by the stunned crowd, is a wonder to behold. Matt doesn’t let the fact that the ball park’s retractable roof begins to close right as he’s ready to jump from a building deter him.
The cast and crew of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (photo by the author)
Johnson admitted in the post-screening Q&A that, like people who appear in the world with perfectly quaffed bedhead, making the show and movie look as effortless as it does actually takes a lot of work. Johnson and McCarrol’s MO for the show and movie is to practice guerilla filmmaking. They don’t get permission to shoot in and around Toronto and often include unwitting extras in their shenanigans. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is essentially two hours of these guys getting themselves into the most outrageous situations possible in order to make their dream come true. They do so while also hilariously riffing on a 1980s cultural touchstone. I, and the crowd at the sold-out premiere, laughed uncontrollably as we watched them do it.