Crude, Haunting, and Strangely Beautiful

MOVIE REVIEW
A Grand Mockery
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Genre: Experimental Thriller, Surreal Drama
Year Released: 2024, 2025
Runtime: 1h 45m
Director(s): Adam C. Briggs, Sam Dixon
Writer(s): Adam C. Briggs, Sam Dixon
Cast: Sam Dixon, Kate Dillon, James Louis O’Leary, Fiarrah Poole
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 Fantasia Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: A GRAND MOCKERY is the kind of film that crawls under your skin and refuses to leave quietly. Directed and co-written by Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon, this surreal Australian feature explodes with gritty sincerity, hallucinatory dread, and a uniquely regional sense of decay. Shot entirely on Super 8mm, it’s as if the film stock itself is rotting before your eyes—perfectly mirroring the mental deterioration of its central character, Josie.

There’s no denying that this is an abrasive film. Josie, played with dead-eyed vulnerability by co-director Dixon, begins as a man working in a cinema, shuffling through life like a ghost in his skin. He spends his off-hours in a fog of addiction, caught between a dying grandfather and a broken personal compass. What starts as an observational character study gradually warps into a nightmarish drift through Brisbane’s forgotten corners, eventually bleeding into the rainforest hinterlands of Queensland.

This isn’t a film that builds in a traditional sense. It mutates. It grows like mold on forgotten walls or moss in abandoned spaces. That constant transformation makes A GRAND MOCKERY hard to define and even harder to ignore. It’s part character study, part social satire, part metaphysical horror—but none of these labels quite do it justice. If you walked into this expecting a clean-cut thriller, you’ll likely find yourself stranded.

The Super 8 format isn’t a gimmick here—it’s the lifeblood of the movie. Its limitations become its strengths, saturating each frame in an unstable blur that mimics Josie’s fractured perspective. There’s a raw, tactile discomfort to the visual texture. Light leaks, flickering edges, and grain that bites into the frame all contribute to the overwhelming sense that reality is collapsing. The filmmakers don’t just use Super 8 for style—they weaponize it.

That said, even the most shocking sequences (and there are several) aren’t exploitative. They come from a place of empathy, no matter how grotesque they get. Whether Josie is vomiting under dim streetlights or wandering rain-soaked streets in a stupor, the camera never grimaces. The film might be cynical about society, but it isn’t cruel toward its protagonist. Josie is treated not as a caricature of madness, but as a man steadily being ground down by the weight of his mind and the systems around him.

At its core, the film examines the dissonance between lived experiences and how society chooses to sanitize or ignore them. Josie is haunted not by ghosts, but by apathy—by the endless noise of a culture that no longer recognizes its decay. Brisbane becomes a symbolic purgatory. And when Josie finally flees to the forest, it doesn’t offer escape, but further dissolution. Nature becomes another mirror to his frayed mind.

Despite its grim aesthetics and unflinching honesty, A GRAND MOCKERY still finds room for humor. Not the comforting kind, but a dark, cringing laughter that bubbles up from discomfort. Whether it’s in Josie’s repetitive, numbed routines or the absurdity of his half-remembered childhood dreams, the film captures that uniquely Australian strain of gallows humor. You’re laughing, but it hurts.

Kate Dillon’s presence as a peripheral but pivotal figure brings occasional clarity. Her scenes break up Josie’s downward spiral just enough to remind you of what’s been lost. Meanwhile, James Louis O’Leary and Fiarrah Poole deliver smaller but memorable supporting turns, often existing more as archetypes of memory or trauma than as fleshed-out characters—but that’s by design. The narrative doesn’t play by the rules, and neither do the people within it.

Some viewers may find the film exhausting. Its second half abandons much of the structure established early on, shifting into a near-dialogue-free, phantasmagoric trip through the rainforest. Depending on your perspective, this either feels like transcendence or a tedious experience. The final stretch might test the patience of those already worn down by the sensory overload of the preceding hour.

The best comparison might be to David Lynch, not just in style, but in the refusal to clarify meaning. Like Lynch, Briggs and Dixon are more interested in truth than narrative coherence. And like Lynch, they understand that the most horrifying moments are often the most mundane: a blank stare, a repeated phrase, a door that closes too slowly.

For fans of experimental cinema, A GRAND MOCKERY is a bold and confident entry into the conversation. For general audiences, it may prove overwhelming, even alienating. But that’s part of its purpose. This is the underside of the Australian dream, shot through a broken lens, howled out from beneath decades of dust and disillusionment.

It’s not an easy watch—but it’s not one you’ll forget anytime soon either.

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