Black Eyed Susan – Fantasia Film Festival 2024 

Black Eyed Susan is a dark challenging film that rewards its viewer with the bleakest cries against AI and Robotics.  

 

Black Eyed Susan is a darkly subversive science fiction film that gut punches you in the way that any good speculative fiction story about the dangers and moral compromising of a technology.  The film by writer/director Scooter McCrae manages to outdo Black Mirror at its own game.  Giving us a brilliant dark question that audiences may not feel comfortable with.  

Out of work and down on his luck Derek (Damian Maffei) attends the funeral for his recently passed friend Alan (Scott Fowler).  While there speaking with their mutual friend Gilbert (Marc Romeo), Derek finds that Alan was working with Gilbert at his tech company.  The work is testing the newest in Android tech.  The Android is designed for BDSM pleasure and is an almost perfect replica of a human called Susan (Yvonne Emilie Thälker).  Needing work as Derek now lives out of his car, takes Gilbert on an offer.  Derek must test the durability of Susan in all the ways that would be needed for BDSM.  As Derek begins his complicated relationship with Susan he begins to find out there is more to this project than he ever bargained for.  

McCrae has not released a film in more than twenty years but has not lost any of the bite in his filmmaking.  Black Eyed Susan is as sharp and deceptively adroit a sci-fi film released in recent memory.  Not just confronting the darkest of impulses that new technology brings but putting a mirror up the “best intentions” of society.  This becomes more impressive as McCrae working on a micro-budget uses little FX trickery to bring his film to the screen.  

In fact, Black Eyed Susan is almost an antiquated affair with cinematographer Anton Zinn shooting the film in 16mm, and a 90s style sync-core score by Italian composing legend Fabio Frizzi.  The film begins as an ode to 90s Skinamax Sexual Thrillers in form and style – as we descend into the dark horrors that await both the audience and Derek.  

Essentially a two-hander, the work by actors Damian Maffei and Yvonne Emilie Thälker is as good as the film’s writing and direction.  Maffei as the morally conflicted Derek who goes down a rabbit hole, he does not expect is perfect. The work here is brave and willing to go to places where few actors do.  

That goes double for the work of Thälker.  The nudity and sex they are asked to do could have come off as exploitative but is as vital to their role as anything in the film.  What begins as a flat performance slowly and assuredly becomes a living being.  The work is as accomplished and brave as you will see from someone this year.  What’s required of them is often complicated in a way that has to toe the line and balance between so many tones.  What could have been just a literal sex bot without much back and forth is beautifully layered and sad in their hands. 

Black Eyed Susan is challenging speculative filmmaking at its finest.  For those more adventuresome cineastes will find one of the very best films of 2024. 

Black Eyed Susan played Fantasia Film Festival 2024 on August 2^nd