The Aesthetic Appeal of Poser at Nightstream 2021 – Top

Poser, the feature film debut from writer/director/editor Noah Dixon and cinematographer/director Ori Segev, is a gorgeously shot (no wonder given that one of the co-directors has mostly worked as a cinematographer in the past) obsession thriller that flips between intriguingly original and unsurprisingly generic throughout its sub-90 minute runtime.

Poser follows Lennon (Sylvie Mix), a young woman on the edges of the Columbus, Ohio underground music scene who desperately wants to break in. She begins a podcast for which she will highlight and interview upcoming artists in the scene and before long she has some success. She befriends rapper Micah (Abdul Seidu) and electro/art pop singer/songwriter Bobbi Kitten (playing a version of herself), both of whom are intimidatingly attractive and invitingly charismatic. Over the course of the film, these friendships grow and Lennon’s desire to not just be near but like these friends, especially Bobbi, leads her to make some less than great decisions.

It’s a fairly well trodden story at this point, born of Single White Female and with the most recent major film iteration in Ingrid Goes West, but it continues to get reinterpreted in different scenes and through different mediums, and never seems to go entirely stale. Poser’s version of this story revolves around music specifically, but the general art, and let’s be honest “hipster,” scene in Columbus.

This setting allows for a nice mix of fantastic concert performances from a number of real bands in the scene, and jokes about self-serious artists and patrons who are more interested in saying something that sounds profound to those around at any given moment than actually creating anything meaningful. The best moments are when these two overlap during the interviews that Lennon does with some of these bands who all seem to be comfortable and willing to make jokes about themselves and the scene.

The involvement of these bands for performances and interviews creates a feeling of a sort of parallel reality to our own that likely plays fantastically for anyone familiar with the bands in real life, and is at the very least interesting for those of us who can just recognize that these are bands playing themselves. But it’s the fact that Bobbi plays a version of herself, as the lead singer of her real band Damn the Witch Siren (with her real life bandmate/music partner Z-Wolf in tow throughout the film as well), that makes Poser unsettlingly original even when the plot is playing through story beats we’ve seen before.

To be fair, the film also doesn’t meet those story beats until surprisingly far into its short runtime, we all know they’re coming so it doesn’t come as any surprise necessarily, but much of the film wanders and functions more as a portrait of Lennon than a thriller. This works to distinguish the film from its obsession thriller siblings, both because it makes us unsure of what will happen next or when and how the other shoe will drop, and because it focuses so entirely on Lennon, the obsessed, and places us on her side non-judgmentally.

Watching Poser is also just enjoyable as an aesthetic experience for all of the great music, beautiful lighting, and good looking people (Bobbi Kitten is stunning to look at in almost every scene) on screen. So while the story doesn’t deliver anything brilliant or excitingly new, the film is a simultaneously enjoyable and unsettling experience.

READ NEXT: 15 Underrated Horror Movies You Should Watch