A young woman’s date with a john takes a surreal turn as her deeply strange motives become more clear.
A new short from the same team behind ‘F*ck Bunny‘, ‘Sundays‘ and ‘Pay Pig‘ (sixshortfilms.com), their first “post” covid foray, and their next iteration of their continuing narrative. ‘Date Night Look’ takes a step away from the dark comedy we are used to seeing from them, with a short step into the science fiction realm. But the style and mood doesn’t run too far as we take the insinuate road to discover the main character and her unusual motives. We spoke with director Wesley Wingo to tell us more about this new movie and its intentions.
Can you tell us what inspired you to bring this story to life?
To tell you the truth, this is a somewhat oblique pitch- or even a cold open/tease for a feature length project we’ve been working on. “Date Night Look” is primarily a tone film for the coming-of-age body horror/ narrative feature film project we’ve been developing during lockdown about “grinders,” youths in America’s sacrifice zones experimenting with embeddable tech via gruesome self-surgery and DIY biohacking in their moms’ basements. Both the main characters here are thin slices of characters from the feature. If Date Night gives anything away, it’s that things get weirder and more grotesque from here.
The character story has a particular arc, how important was it for you to keep things a little hazy?
Originally when conceiving of something short that we could boil down to tease at the “grinder” aspect of the feature, we wanted to make a film that was all about a dark, gross version of that subculture and what a super f’d up version of someone’s life might look like as they try to keep their “hobby” going, without making the film about grinding in and of itself. So things are, as you note, a bit hazy. We wanted to make a film that seemed like it was one particular type of film, something that I think we’re actually kind of used to in both the short and feature space: a kind of “misery porn” seemingly about a junkie, that turns itself around on its head and reveals itself to be about something stranger going on as the short progresses, which hopefully intrigues the viewer for what’s after.
Has the microchip become the new epidemic?
That’s an interesting way to look at it, I think from a wider perspective there is something about the ubiquity of technology and how integrated it’s become to our lives… how pervasive it is, and even how we can get trapped in our own homes by it, feeling sick, feeling that cold pull of addiction. I hadn’t thought of it in this pandemic sense, which is remarkable given that we shot during the pandemic on a COVID safe set, I love that it plays that way.
What do you hope people will take away from DATE NIGHT LOOK?
Honestly, I just hope they’re wanting to see where this is headed, curious what these characters are up to with the upgrades, and what they’re even for. It’s quite a dark ride and that’s what the feature length is all about we’ve already got more short projects on the way too, so hopefully give us a follow!
