Marrow is about podcaster Jamie Foster (Jessica Dawn Willis), who does a True Crime podcast under the name "Distal Marrow" called "Embracing the Paradox." After years of success describing grizzly serial murders, she's feeling burnout, and does an episode on Bigfoot, which her fans hate, and the person running the podcast company she works for (Danielle Harris)--who also happens to be a close friend of her late mother--says she needs to come up with something big, otherwise her funding will be cut and she'll just being doing it as a hobby (like the rest of us). All hope seems to be lost, until a creepy caller comes to her with info on four other area True Crime podcasters who have gone missing. The content is compelling enough to get her back on top, but is she willing to give up her success to save these other victims?
This was definitely a great Halloween season watch, exploring themes not only around modern content creation, but also touching on our modern economy and what it means to have a job like being a podcaster--and what it could mean to lose it. All of this is spun in a horror movie context, that takes the "True Crime podcaster is embroiled in her own True Crime story" plot, and takes it to these extreme horror movie places where anything is possible. You could've taken this script and grounded it more and made it into a Lifetime thriller that would've been a ton of fun to watch and may have been more my speed, but I also appreciated the fact that doing it in this more horror context gave us something--I don't know if "elevated" is the right word, but at least something more serious horror fans could get behind. From there, we have a great lead in Jessica Dawn Willis, and supporting names we recognize like Danielle Harris, Michael Ironside, and Matthew Tompkins. With a VOD release date of November 3rd, this is a great way to extend your Halloween season a bit, and support indie film while you do it.
I figured we'd start with our lead in Jessica Dawn Willis, because a lot of this hinges on her. When we think of horror movie performances, we usually think of the big moments and how well the actor is able to sell them, but sometimes we don't consider all the smaller moments leading up those bigger ones that build the foundation, and that's where Willis really excels for me here. Things like the affected speech of the Millennial podcaster, where "no" almost sounds like "nyoh," that subtly comes and goes depending on who she's talking to and how much she wants to be "Distal Marrow" versus "Jamie Foster;" or the scenes where she's reacting to text messages and phone calls, if it's too much of this popular concept of the vacuous True Crime podcaster, we don't care what happens to her, so she gives us more of a down-to-earth relatable character so we get invested too. That's the thing people love about horror movies, the anarchy of it, how anyone can go at any time, and the only thing that turns that anarchic excitement into tension is having people we're invested in, and I think Willis did a great job of that at the moments we needed it, while being less sympathetic in the moments we needed that too, all building to the big moments at the end.
Part of the stereotype of the vacuous True Crime podcaster I think comes from a sense of envy that people have that someone has found a way to make money doing something fun and outside the drudgery of the 9-to-5 world. Yes, misogyny is also a part of it, especially with disdain for Millennial women True Crime podcasters, so I don't want to ignore that entirely; but in the current economy, where everything is more expensive while wages haven't grown at the same rate, and where companies can let people go at the drop of a hat, it's hard not to be jealous of someone who pops on a computer and not only makes a living talking about True Crime mysteries, but even becomes rich doing it. On a recent episode of Behind the Bastards that was talking about rage baiters on social media, host Robert Evans cited a study where the majority of people said they wanted to make a living as a content creator, and that's even among older participants. So if a lot of people want to make money as a podcaster, imagine what it's like for the people who are making a living as a podcaster? This is where Marrow makes its money for me, when Willis's character is threatened with being pulled from her podcast network, you can see the thought of having to go back to work with the rest of us schlubs motivating her, especially when the police come and ask for her help in their investigation and that threatens her new content. I'm not saying if the DTVC Podcast took off and I could quit my job that I would hinder a police investigation to keep myself from having to go back to a day job, but I can understand why someone would.
The specific genre of podcast this film focuses on is True Crime, which is one my wife Jen will listen to, but I tend to stay away from. Because I don't listen to them much, I can't say if they treat their victims the way those ID Channel shows do, but that's one of the big reasons I stay away, I don't want to think about people dying in horrible ways, and I know at least those ID Channel shows don't focus enough on who the victims are and what they went through beyond the fact that friends and family say they "would light up the room," it's more about the investigative techniques used to find the killer--which we're taking their word for it that the cops are always right that they found the right person. Anyway, I think this film does a great job dealing with both of those realities. First, that these are grizzly murders Distal Marrow is discussing, and reading the details and seeing the images can take their toll; and second, that she is making her money off of that pain and suffering, which leaves her with a dilemma when push comes to shove and her show is at stake. She thought she had an offramp by shifting her show's focus to talking about Bigfoot, but when her audience rebelled, she had to sign that deal with the devil. It's one thing I like about horror, it can explore these kinds of conversations--like is True Crime exploitative, or a needed voice for the victims or wrongly accused--in an extreme way that can't be done in other genres, and this film does a great job working in that space.
Finally, in what is becoming a regular segment on the site, here's another cellphone screen. We have to start with "can we audio chat?" "Audio chat?" Isn't that just a phone call? I thought about it a bit, because a lot of times we come up with new terms for things because the connotations associated with the old ones have baggage. For example, the LLM generative AI industry uses "hallucination" instead of "error" when their LLMs output wrong results. "Hallucination" sounds better than "the thing fucks up a lot because it has limitation, so you should take the results with a grain of salt." In that sense, as someone who hates talking on the phone, maybe calling it an "audio chat" will make me more amendable to a phone call. The other thing is the first part of that sentence says "if I may ask..." and then just asks the question. What if you may not ask? It's too late, you've already asked it. It would be like me eating a bag of chips, and someone reaching in and grabbing some while saying "may I have some of these?" Unlike the "audio chat" thing though, this "may/can I ask" construction has been in English for a long time, and has no purpose other than I guess making us sound more polite, or maybe getting someone's attention before you come right out with the actual question.
And with that, let's wrap this up. This is coming out on VOD on November 3rd, and I think if you're looking for some new indie horror it's worth a look. And maybe November 3rd is the perfect date, because you can watch all your annual Halloween movies first, then after while you're still in a horror mode, you can catch something new. Also, spoiler alert, this doesn't feature a penis drill.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt34686688/
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