My quick rating – 4.9/10. Comedy-horror and cancer, two words you don’t usually see on the same line of a movie description. Yet that’s exactly where The A-Frame starts us off, and the result is an odd little film that feels like it isn’t quite sure whether it wants to gross us out, make us laugh, or tug at the heartstrings. Johnny Whitworth plays a quantum physicist who invents a machine that tunnels into a subatomic universe. In his attempt to prove the thing actually works, he stumbles onto a potential treatment for cancer after testing on rats. Naturally, his next move is to find human volunteers because nothing could possibly go wrong with rushing straight to human trials.
One of those potential subjects is Donna (Dana Namerode), a pianist who’s on the verge of losing her hand. That’s about as heavy a setup as you can drop into a film that’s billing itself as comedy-horror. You can feel the movie testing the waters of whether it wants to mine sympathy or irony out of her situation. Meanwhile, Nik Dodani’s Rishi brings some much-needed levity. His character is a wannabe comedian whose stand-up is so bad, it loops back around to being funny again—intentionally or not. At least someone here knows they’re in a dark comedy.
When the movie finally leans into the “comedy” part of its description, it actually delivers. I legit laughed out loud during the first full-body experiment, a moment that captures exactly the kind of macabre absurdity the film needed more of. Unfortunately, those highlights are few and far between. For most of its lean 82-minute runtime, the movie spins its wheels in science-fiction speculation without much story progression. Writer/director Calvin Reeder clearly owes a debt to Cronenberg’s The Fly, and not just thematically. From the body horror setup to the brooding scientist vibe, this feels a lot like a dollar-store remix of that classic.
That’s not to say The A-Frame doesn’t have its charms. Whitworth does a solid job selling his role as the slightly off-kilter physicist, and his final experiment gets a genuinely funny payoff. When the blood does show up, it shows up in buckets, though those moments are rare enough that gorehounds will probably feel short-changed. I know I did. It’s the kind of movie that teases chaos but spends most of its time meandering in a lab with characters who never quite escape their archetypes.
In the end, the movie feels like a Black Mirror episode that overstayed its welcome. The premise is clever enough, the humor is appropriately dark, and the low-budget execution is competent. But there just isn’t enough meat on the bone to justify its feature-length status. Trim it down by half and it could be a tight, biting little short. Or, better yet, pitch it to Jordan Peele for the next season of The Twilight Zone. As it stands, The A-Frame is worth a casual watch if you like your science experiments laced with blood and bad jokes, but don’t expect to walk away feeling anything stronger than a shrug.
There are a handful of streamers carrying this flick, including Amazon.
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