At any given moment during Luca Guadagnino film Challengers, Trent Reznor’s relentless, teeth-grinding industrial music commits one unforced error after another, drowning out allegedly plot-sensitive conversations, and any chance of keeping viewers meaningfully engaged.
Challengers, starring the serviceable and winsome Zendaya (as Tashi), is an obsessive exercise in temporal distortion (it’s nothing but a series of time jumps) for - seemingly - no other reason than to reinforce a self-evident truth about a throuple and its puppet-master. Tashi will forever pit life-long tennis player bros Art and Patrick against each other for her own amusement. She’s Pavlov, Nick Bollettieri and Catherine the Great all rolled into one tiny, terrifying package.
The film ends with the ultimate grudge-match between Art and Patrick in a third-set breaker, one point in, Art trust-falling over the net cord into Patrick’s arms after a failed attempt to overhead-smash his rival into yesterday, an austere Zendaya suddenly animalistic — leaping to her to stilettoed feet to unnecessarily cry out what we already know: “Come on!”
She’s done it. She’s single-handedly relit the fire in her husband’s belly. Now he’ll complete his slam at the U.S. Open, committing to professional tennis indefinitely.
The film’s central problem has been “solved.” The lead characters have each regained their life’s purpose: Tashi can coach a champion, Art can be one, and Patrick can antagonize with impunity. In other words, nothing has changed: it’s a 360 degree narrative that tries to disguise that fact by bending time to its will and using Reznor’s score to disrupt our logical-sequential thinking.
But the unsolved, ongoing problem? Guadagnino has contributed another high-energy, empty-calorie, all style-no-substance, star-driven picture to the Hollywood landfill, masquerading as an indie film just because it cost 55 million dollars to make.
Enter the Brewer Brothers - Benjamin and Alex - two creatives hailing from the hometown of Henry David Thoreau, genuine foils to one another as co-directors, co-writers, co-VFXers.
There’s a lot of “co” happening there.
Case in point: the newly-released Arcadian starring Nick Cage. At its self-protected heart, it’s a film about brothers. That the two boys are battling amorphous, rabid, elongated jackals whose heads are on swivels, across a stretch of post-apocalyptic countryside, is just the vehicle - the excuse - to tell the story of two brothers finding a way to coexist in a world that has suddenly become much smaller, much more their own.
In their first feature, 2016’s The Trust, the Brewer boys write-and-direct Cage (Stone) and Elijah Wood (Waters) across another desolate landscape: the desert strip of Las Vegas.
And, that one man is named Stone and the other Waters seems allegorically deliberate. As Andrea Ballestero writes (for a social science journal about the elements), they’re “archetypes of binary relations conjured as opposites. Water is supposed to be fluid, form changing, in constant movement. Stone is said to be fixed, enduring, and static unless intentionally moved.”
Water - as the universal solvent - wears away rock, mitigating its rough edges and abrasive surfaces leading to (among other things) those smooth, flattened stones that beachcombers covet.
Cage’s Stone oversees evidence lock-up for the LVPD. Wood’s Waters is his underling. Nearly two decades divide them — yet they feel, more than anything, like siblings. The former lives in an anonymous ranch-house with his ailing father (played by tireless telethoner Jerry Lewis in his final performance), the latter frequents prostitutes for sad, dissociated trysts after being abandoned (by death or disengagement) by a wife whose clothes remain open-boxed in his apartment kitchen.
They’re opposites always, and in all ways: Stone is affectionate (possibly romantically interested in his subordinate), putting his arm around Waters at a hotel bar, with some light massaging tossed in. Waters recoils.
Career-wise, Stone’s ambitions include requisitioning mobile labs to “analyze the evidence chain directly at the scene,” but he’s viewed as a pest by his commander, and perhaps everyone else on the force. Waters is more like American Beauty’s Lester Burnham in the sense that he wants a job with “the least amount of responsibility,” spending his days drugging, whoring, and buying time (for what it’s not clear: until she returns?).
Stone can’t be moved. He won’t take no from the commander, so he asks the next administrator down the chain, and so on (despite saying “Yes, sir. Of course, sir,” to their admonitions — he’s not done).
Waters is the empty vessel you can fill with whatever desire or scheme you wish, so Stone is pouring his deferred dreams into his protege’s gaping mouth — his patsy, his brother.
Alex and Ben Brewer (symbolically A and B — as Alex is the elder) have collaborated far more than they haven’t.
On their joint CV are two features (The Trust and Arcadian), some wildly-imaginative music videos (for Bieber, Skrillex, The Chainsmokers and Capital Cities), and a handful of high-impact ad campaigns for Madison Avenue-sized (and boutique) firms.
Their MTV Award-winning “Where Are U Now” video features a collabo between Skrillex and Diplo (and the Biebs thrown in for pop-star wattage). Until roughly 2016, one year after the video first aired, the two globetrotting DJs were closer than close: brothers from other mothers.
Not all brothers stay together.
The Trust was made for somewhere around 7 million dollars, and was originally scheduled to film in Boston - the Brewer’s home city. Issues with permitting, Cage’s availability, and production costs made Vegas the better bet.
For perspective, Christopher Nolan’s Memento was made for two million dollars more in the year 2000 (and that’s $16,000,000.00 in today’s terms).
But when you pump 8 times more money into a project like Challengers, it’s easy to see where the cash goes and how little it gets you: Trent Reznor to score it, and Zendaya (at her most in-demand) to star.
Given its lack of narrative depth, Challengers’ team has but one path to success: make the filmic equivalent of shopping at Abercrombie and Fitch during an end-of-season sale. That requires ear-splitting, putting-hair-on-your chest decibel-level music that never ceases, cloying cologne saturating the air, and fast-fashion as far as the racks can stretch.
In stark contrast, The Trust is a quiet film (save for one engineered explosion, a brief shootout, and a surprise shattered windshield) often spent in intimate spaces: the workshop and kitchen of Stone’s modest home, the apartment over the bodega, Waters’ depressing flat. The bodega schematics are sketched out (using masking tape) in a secluded construction zone behind the police station. The camera often catches Stone essentially by his lonesome, taking a deep breath before entering a hotel-casino, staking out the movements of a criminal gang as they transfer valuables from point A to point B, or standing in a wrecking yard surveying the lifeless body of a gun dealer.
But the Brewers do use music in The Trust. And when they do - it seems a willful act of transcending their MTV circumscriptions. The opening sequence (set to “Tipping Strings” by Tokay Lewis) could have easily been directed by Vince Gilligan, and would neatly fold into a season of Better Call Saul. It establishes setting (the outskirts of a gaudy Vegas strip), characterization (a cop who’s also a low-level criminal paying for sex and getting high before donning his uniform — it’s not Carson City after all), and expectations (Waters is late for work, stumbling into a major drug bust going sideways, suggesting a guy who definitely won’t come through in the clutch).
If anything, it feels eerily similar to Season 6, Episode 1 of Better Call Saul — the flash-forward runs about five minutes, sans dialogue, telegraphing Jimmy’s downfall: the fruits of his Sandpiper settlement and union with Walt boxed up and carted away. His life-sized cardboard cut-out having its own Gatsby moment — double-sided, face-down in the pool.
The Trust’s conclusion uses the same diegesis - “Tipping Strings” - an up-tempo anthem reminiscent of early 70s Curtis Mayfield. Instead of bottles of Viagra and silken neckties cataloged by the DEA’s personal moving company at chez Jimmy, it’s Waters’ wedding ring and badge slipped into plastic, and the drill used to penetrate the bodega’s vault, forklifted to a corner of the very evidence lockup Waters had slept-walked through and Stone had thoughtfully surveyed.
I’d imagine that when you’re brothers (I only have a sister - and she’s older), there are many “blocks” to having a long-term creative partnership. In his lightest and truest incarnation, Alex Brewer is a sculptor, and there are times when that fact (and craft) comes in mightily handy. Other times, not so much.
Arcadian is - definition-wise - a rural paradise. The Brewer’s 2024 film of the same name required Alex to return to filmmaking - heading to Dublin to create practicals for creatures that are nameless and photophobic, apex predators who hunt humans after nightfall.
I can only conjecture if the Ireland work-trip was a paradise for Alex, or a duty to his brother. Or both.
As a sculptor, he’s uniquely qualified to make horror - monsters, but few would consider what Rob Bottin does “fine art” (despite terrifying audiences with his made-up prosthetics in The Thing, and animating dozens of “bruised forearm movies” - to quote Roger Ebert).
But that’s what brothers (sometimes) do.
To - whole-fur - invent beasts that look like a union between Groot (from Guardians of the Galaxy), Robert Wadlow, and a molting pterodactyl — and sound like a Dyson on its highest setting with a Lego brick rattling around inside…
That’s no small thing.
Alex’s sculpture - his practical special effect - is far more convincing than anything Bottin ever realized in latex. And that’s not a fair comparison, I know. We’re talking about 40 years worth of technology sea change between them.
But it speaks to how The Brewer Brothers have changed Hollywood.
You’re not supposed to be able to make a movie like Arcadian for 12 million dollars - but we’re talking about The Brewer Brothers: they are the indie Chris Nolan: they always deliver early, and always come in under budget.
At the center of Arcadian is not “it’s the end of the world as we know it,” but embodying the maxim of “my brother’s keeper.”
Cage’s movie sons Joseph and Thomas are twins - their mother is absent (the dead wife seems a recurring theme that further connects them to Nolan) - their father is a human Swiss army knife who seals off doors and windows from the nighttime creepers, survives explosions (I hadn’t realized it until now - Cage pretends to be blown up in the apartment with Wood in The Trust, and Cage is - literally blown up in a close space with his movie son Thomas, here), and embarks on a suicide mission in the name of selfless fatherhood.
While Joseph sketches and studies the things that go snap, crackle and pop in the night, playing possum to ensnare a live example for dissection, Thomas is preoccupied with his neighbor Charlotte Rose, the daughter of a secretive (read: sketchy) couple whose motives (or modus operandi) are never explored or revealed.
Despite their ever-diverging interests (Joseph is dutiful and respects curfew, Thomas flouts his father’s laws, and downplays the clear and present dangers of daily life — adjusted for apocalypse, of course), they’re brothers.
For Act Three, they take on the unnamed cackle of nightmares made flesh in a climax that is hand-held mayhem and balls-to-the-wall, Harry-Hart-in-church, hand-to-hand combat.
The blood-fest bonds them in a way being actual twins never could. Charlotte survives. The trio drive off to pastures beyond what they know - or what we understand. There’s vague talk of others who may have survived the night.
What’s most impressive about these Hollywood underdogs (Ben and Alex) is that they are far too humble to believe they’re as good as Christopher Nolan or John Carpenter. The Trust and Arcadian are near-perfect films because they never try to be more than they are, and the same is true of The Brewer Brothers.
Close your eyes for ten seconds and think about the most powerful films of the last few years. A movie that didn’t just get Oscar buzz, but won, and was a film that audiences enthusiastically watched again and again.
If you came up with Everything Everywhere All at Once - as I did - then you’ve seized upon a film whose look and feel can (in no small measure) be attributed to Benjamin Brewer — a starting player on its VFX team.
If you ever want to watch a music video for a pop song that is also a deep meditation on parasocial relationships, then look no further than “Where Are U Now.” Once again, it’s The Brewer Brothers bringing substance to an industry steeped in style.
And if you want to understand what the new Hollywood looks like — led quietly and humbly by two brothers in their late 30s who may or may not make films together from cradle to grave — all you need to do is watch the best heist film you’ve never heard of, and the most lean and minimalist horror film you’ll never unsee. There are moments in Arcadian that best the transforming hound in The Thing. There are scenes in The Trust that are more actorly than anything Frank Oz pulled out of Ed Norton and Robert De Niro in The Score. There are visual effects in Everything Everywhere All at Once that make a mockery of 90% of the CGI-centric cinema that came before it.
The Brewer Brothers have already humbly changed Hollywood. The open question is whether or not Hollywood can overcome its hubris and acknowledge that fact.