Sour Minnows Jennie Kermode action
Harrison Atkins has carved out a distinctive place in cinema since his breakout feature, Lace Crater, released in 2015. From that point, Atkins has consistently demonstrated a fascination with the architecture of filmmaking itself—exploring the fascinating space where reality, illusion, and the truly otherworldly collide on screen.
In his latest feature, which premiered at the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival, Atkins compiles a series of seemingly disparate ideas. Individually, these concepts might appear meaningless, but when woven together, they suggest an overwhelming, incomprehensible threat emanating from something profoundly alien.
The film is less about conventional narrative and more about unsettling juxtaposition. It asks the viewer to consider what lies just beyond the edge of perception—a boundary that proves far more fragile than we assume it to be.
This sense of the surreal is immediately put into stark focus in a memorable scene. Ricky (David Brown) and his friend Tepper (Chase Williamson) stumble upon an astonishing sight: a group of six men sensuously licking the pavement.
Such moments are often dismissed as simple absurdity, but within Atkins’ vision, this event acts as a potent metaphor for deeper anxieties. It taps into that contemporary feeling we joke about, referring to it as ‘a glitch in the matrix,’ hinting at an intrusion of something fundamentally wrong into our perceived reality.
The incident forces the audience to confront the unsettling possibility that what they witness might not be an anomaly, but a genuine indication of a threat so alien that escaping its comprehension becomes an impossible task.
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