Darla in Space entirely hinges its sci-fi plot on its absurd comedy, for better or for worse. Eric Laplante and Susie Moon’s feature directorial debut had its World Premiere at the 20th Independent Film Festival Boston.
Premiering at the 20th Independent Film Festival Boston, Darla in Space (written and directed by Eric Laplante and Susie Moon) is a weird movie, one that is easiest described in relation to others. It fits among comedies like Greener Grass (Dirs. Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe) that go off-the-wall with absurd humor and unsubtle structuring. From the duo’s own mouth, their influences include Mars Attacks, The Man with Two Brains, Being John Malcovich, and the works of Quentin Dupieux.
The movie revolves around Darla Peterson (Alex E. Harris), a woman who unknowingly lives an unsatisfactory life as a janitor. One day she breaks into her boss’s mysterious monolithic storage unit, which turns out to contain a sentient, oversized kombucha SCOBY who can talk like HAL 9000. The SCOBY, known as Mother, offers to give Darla an experiential orgasm greater than any earthly pleasure.
The unserious conflict of the movie is that Darla owes $349,000.22 to the IRS, and Mother inexplicably wants to go to space. From here, the two join forces to help achieve one another’s goals: Darla will commodify Mother’s orgasm-producing powers to make enough money to pay off her debts, and then she will figure out how to take Mother to space.
Darla is an original creation of Harris, who has used the character in various online shorts. She portrays the character as a deadpan, socially inept woman whose only hobby seems to be creating fundamentally flawed and nonsensical startups, the latest of which is a business that sells caskets to the owners of dead cats. She experiences some sort of a hero’s journey, and the contrast between her newfound semi-confidence and her fundamentally submissive demeanor becomes a strong point of comedy.
As with many absurd comedies of this type, things sort of just happen in relation to Darla’s primary quest of exploiting Mother for profit. Darla chooses to book a room at an inn, and employs guerilla marketing to advertise her new startup of providing unworldly orgasms. Business quickly gets going, and the movie largely focuses on Darla’s interactions with the types of characters who would pick up on such an offer. In between are many orgasm phantasmagoria sequences of AI-generated animation, which are of dubious legality but illustrate the cosmic stimulative powers of Mother.
Much of the movie revolves around the individual exploits of Darla and Mother, but the supporting cast does a lot for the movie when present. Constance Shulman is scene-stealingly funny as Darla’s parentally inept mother, who has the ego of Lucille Bluth and the locomotive ability of Norma Bates: she acts as a comical exaggeration of the type of parent who will never let their kids leave their domain. Woody Fu portraying Darla’s pathetic-yet-overconfident ex Stuart is another highlight, with his meek attempts to leverage Darla’s possibly illegal activity never making any impact.
If what’s described about the movie sounds unappealing, you are probably not going to enjoy it; the reverse is also true. Darla in Space is the type of movie that never hides its intentions: the entire story hinges on its bizarro sci-fi premise, and whether the movie succeeds in being funny at any given moment is what determines its worth. As is common with this approach, it varies. Sometimes it feels derivative of surreal internet humor, but the character-centric jokes are what consistently land: Darla Peterson is a really funny type of individual, and Harris clearly understands the bit on a molecular level.
