Anchors Aweigh

When an overeager artist (Matt Barats) proposes to his Broadway-bound girlfriend, her perturbed appeal that they “take space” sends him spiralling into a reverie of desperate nostalgia and pitiable self-reflection. Impulsively moving into a sailboat moored by a New York airport, our jilted lover seeks solace by sifting through a stack of home movies, only to be confronted by his own arrested adolescence and the creeping dread that he might indeed be a loveless loser. Such anxiety festers across a series of increasingly surreal vignettes, which Barats stoically narrates with incisive comic precision as his persona wrestles with all the ennui, alienation, and cringe that comes with existence.

Oscillating between a self-deprecating essayistic form that parodies Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, and shrewdly shaggy comedy sketches whose deadpan punchlines hit with the hysterically awkward tenor of a Nathan Fielder bit, writer-director Barats refines the alt-comedy sensibility previously savoured in his award-winning underground film Cash Cow and his collaborations with Anthony Oberbeck and Graham Mason (the Reveries trilogy).

Producers Allie Viti and Whit Conway are frequent collaborators of comedians John Wilson and Joe Pera, known for gently amusing observations that give way to disarming profundity. Barats similarly achieves a wholesome resonance with his practiced non sequiturs, despite a more satirically entitled and serrated disposition.

Buoyed by Simon Hanes’ dreamy jazz score, Anchors Aweigh is a laugh-out-loud plea for human connection. Simultaneously sardonic and sincere, it is sure to be a source of constant quotation from any Midnighter who sets sail on its delightfully absurd wavelength.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

Content advisory: coarse language, crude content, sexual content