Chained for Life

Aaron Schimberg’s sophomore effort is this messy but satisfying satire on filmmaking, exploitation, and representation. Jess Weixler stars Mabel, a lovely, slightly dim young actress cast as the lead in the English-language debut of a low-rent-Herzog-wanna-be (Charlie Korsmo), credited as Herr Director. His film within the film, The Undesirables, appears to be a mad-scientist horror movie with echoes of Tod Browning’s 1932 classic Freaks. We are clearly on the set of a low-budget affair of dubious quality about a mad scientist performing surgical experiments on people with disfigurements. Actual disfigured and disabled people are hired to play the mad doctor's test subject. Most of these folks are not actors but have worked on movies before because of their unique characteristics. One is a man named Rosenthal, who has a significant role. He's played by Adam Pearson, an activist with the genetic condition known as neurofibromatosis. Pearson made his acting debut as one of Scarlett Johansson’s encounters in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.

Mabel's efforts to connect with her facially disfigured co-star make up a significant portion of the film. One key scene is shot with a subjective camera style that lingers on the two actors' faces, where they discuss the craft of acting, empathy, and the business of acting and representation. How the rest of the cast and crew behave around Rosenthal and the rest of the deformed extras, who are all housed at the defunct hospital location, underlies the movie's themes about how awkward and insecure most humans are. The film succeeds because it's not pretentious but playful, never didactic or sentimental, but Schimberg is also never totally clear about what the film is ultimately trying to say and why (besides the obvious meta-reasons) it uses the title of Harry L. Fraser’s 1952 exploitation film that starred the real-life conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Schimberg’s Chained for Life is as much a satire about low-budget filmmaking as it is about how underrepresented communities are depicted in cinema. Not all of it works, but there are some great scenes, big laughs, and a fair amount to chew on.