DARLA IN SPACE (Slamdance 2024) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Darla has problems. While her small business making custom made feline funerary caskets is growing nicely, thanks to her overbearing mother’s shady business skills Darla is looking down the barrel of an enormous tax bill that her day job mopping floors just won’t cover. But fortune rears its head in the unexpected shape of a sentient kombucha scoby – “Mother” – that has the ability to grant humans who come into intimate contact with it life-changing orgasms.
So Darla makes a deal: Mother helps her earn the money to pay off her tax bill, and in return she will facilitate Mother achieving its dream: to go to outer space. With no intention of coming through on her part of the bargain, however, whether Darla’s peculiar money-making plan will save her remains one of the many questions that drives the film.
Marked by a premise that you need to read twice to make sure you haven’t hallucinated it, the dazzling, silly Darla in Space is everything that indie film does best. Alex E. Harris steals the show and wins our hearts as the eponymous Darla in a film brought unforgettably to life by writer-director team Susie Moon and Eric Laplante. Husband-and-wife Laplante and Harris had already established a strong collaborative energy both personally and in their long-running podcast Alex and Eric Live Together, and the confidence and clarity with which Darla in Space is pulled together speaks of a team wholly familiar with each other’s strengths and quirks.
What results feels akin to catching lightning in a bottle, the rendering of a kind of offbeat, quirky energy into something that feels almost tangible, as real and yet as simultaneously unreal as the orgasm-giving kombucha scoby itself. Now playing at Slamdance, this is the kind of film that can only come from a very rare and precious kind of collaborative energy, and it is this bringing together of such like-minded weirdos both behind and in front of the camera that surely provides the magic which allows this aggressively wackadoodle little movie to so gracefully stick its landing.
