Can Dasha Nekrasova’s Debut Film Escape The Shadow Of ‘Red Scare’?
'The Scary Of Sixty-First' comes with a lot of baggage, and Nekrasova isn't sure how it's going to be received.
“I think you should keep the interview to not insulting Dasha, but thanks.”
The cutting sentence comes from a sharp, American voice, one of two blank Zoom profiles sitting in on a chat with director, writer, actress, and podcaster Dasha Nekrasova. The person is reprimanding me for saying Dasha sounds “insane” when expressing her belief that child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself — a belief I and many terminally online people hold.
While her publicist is quick to defend, Nekrasova laughs that she’s been called far worse. The morning we chat, she has been called a fascist, an intellectual grifter and ‘elementarily bad’, after her left-ish podcast Red Scare released an interview with decidedly un-leftist InfoWars creator Alex Jones, for which she and co-host Anna Khachiyan visited his Texan ranch to chat and shoot guns with him.
It’s something of a full-circle moment, as Red Scare launched shortly after Nekrasova went viral in 2018 for being ambushed by an InfoWars host while dressed as Sailor Moon at South By South West. The video captures Nekrasova’s charm: she’s unflappably dry, more focused on her phone and iced coffee than the interview, openly mocking the flustered, accusatory host with a detached, bemused vocal fry that refuses to take the bait.
Three years later, Nekrasova isn’t mocking Jones in their interview. Instead, she and Khachiyan are gentle interviewers, not challenging his repeated view that elites want to kill 80-90 percent of the global population, and offering empathy around the mental breakdown that led him to popularise the conspiracy that the Sandy Hook massacre victims were ‘crisis actors’.
Her publicist’s snipe is understandable; much like Comfrey, the continually anxious PR Nekrasova plays on the latest season of Succession, she has a tough job. Unlike Comfrey’s boss Kendall Roy, Nekrasova isn’t driven by a need to be liked or continually say the ‘right thing’. And it’s this refusal to play by the ‘rules’ of contemporary left culture that has amassed Red Scare enough fans to earn $80,000 AUD a month from subscriptions on Patreon (pre the service’s fees). While the lo-fi pod tackles everything from AOC to NFTs and Twitter controversies du jour, the unifying factor is frustration and anger at hollow liberalism.
This comes out with callous force, where the duo are willing to criticise topics and figures others wouldn’t dare publicly, including those within the #MeToo, trans rights and Black Lives Matter movements, which they argue have all been co-opted by activists who use it to benefit their own brand and stature. They have also been criticised for transphobia, racism, fascism, being rapist sympathisers and promoting eating disorders. Within this context comes The Scary of Sixty-First, Nekrasova’s directorial debut which won €30,000 at the 2021 Berlinale for Best First Feature.
Eyes Wide Open
The Scary of Sixty-First is about two 20-something women Addie (Betsey Brown) and Noelle (Nekrasova’s co-writer Madeleine Quinn) who discover their suspiciously cheap Upper East Side apartment was previously owned by Epstein, and meet a character named The Girl (Nekrasova) determined to unearth the truth of Epstein’s death and crimes. The housemates are soon possessed: Addie, by a 13-year-old girl who died in the apartment, while Noelle follows Nekrasova’s unnamed character down a rabbit-hole ‘investigation’, largely running through the city and scrolling the internet while on amphetamines.
“I think you should keep the interview to not insulting Dasha, but thanks.”
It echoes Nekrasova’s own skittish, Vyvanse-fuelled headspace after Epstein’s August 2019 death, where she’d find herself visiting locales from his life and death across Manhattan, including his Upper East Side mansion and the Metropolitan Correctional Centre. “Making the film was a very cathartic way for me to expunge manic energy and anguish that I sort of had about [Epstein],” she tells me.
But The Scary itself isn’t a cathartic watch, though there is a sort of comfort in recognising its references. It’s a jumble of tension inducing Giallo aesthetics and apathetic mumblecore acting, mixed together with a frenetic glee that mirrors the confidence of tin-foil hats joining the dots of two separate drawings. It also pulls heavily from iconography and scenes from all-time greats (Possession, Eyes Wide Shut, American Psycho) to create a horror that, while not particularly scary, carries a powerfully eerie yet bored rage — a monotonal exasperation familiar to listeners and critics of Red Scare.
The most direct reference is pulled from Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut, starring Tom Cruise as a married man seduced by the erotic thrill of an elite orgiastic party. When Cruise’s character tries to contact this organisation, he receives a threatening letter that appears word for word in The Scary.
“When we came up with the idea to use the real letter, that’s when the movie clicked into place,” says Nekrasova, “because it set it in the extended universe of Eyes Wide Shut, which had a bit of a renaissance around [The Scary’s writing] as it was the 20th anniversary. And the Epstein stuff caused people to maybe look at it in a new light, and see it for what it was on a meta-level. It wasn’t a marital drama, it was a story about elite power structures, which is also what Scary is.”
Linking your debut feature to Kubrick’s final film is a move of confidence, one which characterises The Scary’s confronting and self-deprecating style (another 2021 film, Jim Cumming’s The Beta Test, also updates Eyes Wide Shut ‘for the #MeToo era’, though never as directly). But the film may be too mired by Red Scare to be considered on its own merits: Nekrasova’s presence in Succession, her biggest to date, has been distracting for those who know her, and The Scary has undoubtedly (and understandably) been pre-judged before it’s been watched.
In their interview with Jones, Nekrasova & Khachiyan frame him as a performance artist, which insinuates they are too. Whether Nekrasova’s ‘performance’ as a podcaster will inhibit her career as an actor and director is unclear. When I ask Nekrasova about whether she’s worried critics and audiences arrive at the film with pre-conceived ideas, she uses a classic Red Scare distinction: she hopes that people engage ‘in good faith’ and with an open heart, rather than look for reasons to hate it.
“The people [who have seen it in previews] are [doing so] in good faith, but they’re usually fans of the pod who know my aesthetic,” she says. “The response has been pretty positive, but it’ll be interesting to see when a wider audience is exposed to it.”
Jared Richards is Junkee’s Drag Race recapper, and a freelance critic who writes for NME, The Guardian, The Monthly and more. He’s on Twitter at @jrdjms.
The Scary of Sixty-First is now screening in cinemas nationally.