By KEVIN HOOVER
What happens when a 40-something YouTuber finds unexpected success after following a mysterious life coach’s advice? What starts positive soon turns dark and violent, including missing persons, dental trauma and an elaborate conspiracy, all brought to you by director Chris Vander Kaay and the distribution team at POV Horror/Independent Found Footage in the new found footage nightmare .ask.
The film is set in the world of a wannabe YouTube influencer, with much of the story of unearned confidence and instant celebrity coming from the director’s real life and experiences in the world of marketing. The darkly comical thriller with tinges of cosmic horror takes place in Florida, Las Vegas, the internet and other locales with production elements that make it more ambitious than its $500 price tag would lead you to believe. That’s where the director’s guerrilla filmmaking sensibilities came into play. “This whole film is reverse engineered from actual circumstances,” Vander Kaay admits. “My car was stolen and taken on a joyride, so I wrote it into the script. Someone was actually arrested in a parking lot in the background of one of our scenes, and we wrote it in. The whole thing started because I was getting my front six teeth replaced and wanted to use it as a before-and-after story element somehow.”
.ask came together thanks to help from producers Mary Beth McAndrews and Preston Fassel. “The DIY, take-no-prisoners guerilla filmmakers of yesteryear like Robert Rodriguez, Andy Milligan and Susan Seidelman all wished they had access to tech of this quality,” Fassel said of the equipment used to make the film. ”At the same time, the use of a cell phone to shoot a movie that’s about a life lived terminally online is a great metanarrative technique. This may be one of the few films that benefits from being watched on a cell phone. It’s a great cautionary tale about hustle culture told in grand EC Comics tradition. The Cryptkeeper with an iPhone 13, if you will.”
