‘Sour Minnows’ Review: A Hypnotic Horror Movie About Being Human When Nothing Feels Real

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. “HOLLYWOOD HEARTACHE,” reads the nightly news. “DEATH OF AN ENIGMA.“ Announcing the mysterious passing of Jojo “Vacation” Monica (Phil Burgers) to the living room of two Los Angeles roommates, the surreal broadcast peppered throughout Harrison Atkins‘ profoundly unsettling “Sour Minnows” is just one part of a seemingly infinite refraction. Ricky (David Brown) and Tepper (Chase Williamson) aren’t familiar with the work of the late performer. At least, they don’t think they are. But the 45-year-old Monica was an eccentric celebrity found dead under unusual circumstances, and that’s reason enough for the slacker cinephiles to cue up a movie of his they’ve never seen. But a quick torrent later, and there’s confusion: “What are you doing now?” “I’m hooking up the hard drive,” Ricky says. “Don’t you want to watch this movie?” “I don’t know,” Tepper replies. “I literally feel like we just watched it.” That kind of sick twist on an old Abbott and Costello routine would feel more like snide commentary about the waning indie film scene — if it weren’t for the literal gaps in memory already plaguing both characters. Instead, bookended by the name of the real artist for whom this feature is dedicated (more on that later), “Sour Minnows” skips past showbiz parody to reveal a compassionate reflection on what it means to start feeling more like a data point than a person. Blurring the boundaries between human consciousness and the steady hum of digital machinery that increasingly powers everyday life, “Sour Minnows” isn’t a typical watch. In fact, long before Ricky and Tepper’s bizarro movie night, that same news anchor (Ryan Perez) sits in a field behind a rundown building, calmly announcing Armageddon as a pack of zombies closes in. “This gaping cave is opening its mouth, and down its throat we will all fall,” he announces plainly. Prophesying the kind of doomsday we’ve already seen in countless other horror movies, the anchorman is also describing something Ricky, Tepper, and the audience have already seen in this very film. “Sour Minnows” opens with a pack of these brain-dead humanoids slurping small fish off the street, a sight Ricky and Tepper stumble on together but only one of them remembers. “We dropped the groceries, dude,” Tepper says, leaving Ricky less scared than confused. That “permanent state of déjà vu,” as Ricky’s eventual love interest Aura (Suzanna Son) calls it, transforms Atkins’ unique end-of-days into a fascinating reconsideration of both lo-fi cinema and personal experience as framing devices for truth. The singular indie filmmaker snaps his audience to attention by repeatedly destabilizing the structure of his own story. In turn, he prompts the viewer to ask whether or not they understand what they’ve just witnessed. Have you seen this scene before? Has Ricky? What about Tepper? Is the film repeating itself? Or did you stop paying attention? If not, why not? Wait, that’s… Where are we? In the end, “Sour Minnows” doesn’t restrict itself to one interpretation, and considering the mesmeric slipperiness of the tale, neither should you. The plot mostly follows Ricky, a sad stoner who trains AI for a living and sometimes “zones out” while doing it. But both he and Tepper are remarkably hard to like as modern heroes. The kind of amateur filmmaker who asks anyone and everyone if they want to be in his short without explaining anything about it, Tepper embodies the entitlement plaguing the independent art world since well before the founding of Sundance. And though Ricky isn’t quite so self-obsessed, his malaise hints at a comparable type of privilege. Not liking these guys to begin with proves important, as Atkins quietly encourages the audience to interrogate which parts of humanity they’re quickest to dismiss. Sure, Tepper may be making some crappy short film (well, two, plus a music video), but even the slightest motivation to create something looks like an urge worth protecting in a once flourishing creative landscape — suddenly reduced to an obvious racket built on cosmic anxiety and emotional rot. As the existential force hiding at the heart of “Sour Minnows” steadily consumes the California neighborhood around it, Ricky’s attempts to understand himself grow harder to mock. He’s got a crush on Aura, who he wants to impress. And maybe Ricky could be a serious artist if he really committed to it. But how can you take it slow with a girl if you don’t know how long you’ve been dating her? And what’s the point of building a career if you can’t remember yesterday? Wandering through a strip mall while completing AI training modules for his job, Ricky hears a recording of another human describing the same sort of disjointed thinking. She says she shows up places without remembering how she got there, and then she says things that don’t feel natural or accurate to who she knows herself to be. Later, Ricky writes “MEN’S ROOM” in his Notes app, desperately attempting to leave himself a breadcrumb — while also forcing us to ask: Is this the best a guy can do when it comes to protecting his own sanity? It’s pathetic in a funny way, but even billed as a “comedy” for its world premiere at Fantasia Festival, “Sour Minnows” is far from a feel-good film. Here, Atkins blends bold arthouse bravado with the quaint charm of home video to create tangible proof that the hallmarks of authenticity are changing before our very eyes — in real life and onscreen. Dense prose spews from the news anchor until his words threaten to mean nothing, while whatever humanity actually needs to know arrives in short, blunt bursts from minor characters you might miss at first glance. The result is a city alarmingly overpopulated with ideas, but stripped of color and life. Monica is perhaps the cruelest example, as we’re introduced to the strange, deceased artist in a sequence that shows him crawling through a series of dirty tunnels in tremendous pain. But by the time Monica’s death is on the news, the interview clip in which he explicitly describes being “inhabited” by a yellow being who “pilots” him sounds like the nonsense of a man doomed to die. Of course, he’s telling the truth, but Jojo’s humanity is easy to miss when you’re watching a screen within a screen and following two conversations at once. Ironically, “Sour Minnows” is most palatable when it stutters into recognizable supernatural horror. The group acting credits (“LICKING MEN,” “TUNNEL DENIZENS,” “SILHOUETTED FORMS,” “THEATER CRAZIES,” “GROPING HANDS”!) say a lot. But if Atkins’ monsters are legible, then his views on ordinary life are much harder to decipher. That distinction matters for a film constantly flirting with the notion that its own ideas might just be more noise, whether its auteur or the humans he created know it or not. “Sour Minnows” is extremely opaque, sometimes to its detriment. Atkins’ 2015 feature “Lace Crater” is significantly easier to parse, and its creature effects are, by and large, much more compelling than what he’s working with here. There are so many concepts colliding in “Sour Minnows” that productive ambiguity and plain incoherence can become difficult to differentiate, and that may mean this work won’t travel as far as its themes are worth. Still, that vexing style feels honest to the film’s purpose, and reducing “Sour Minnows” to one buzzword consideration (AI, mental health, grief, social media, indie cinema, whatever) would flatten a project explicitly concerned with what gets lost when the human condition is reduced to categorization in the first place. If Atkins can’t quite answer what makes Ricky and Tepper human, he at least twists himself into knots proving that something in almost all of us is sensitive, vulnerable, and badly served by a broken system perpetually reshuffling. “I feel like the movie was really challenging to watch sometimes,” Tepper says. “Did you actually watch it?” his roommate responds. At several points in “Sour Minnows,” Ricky is forced to watch himself from afar. The effect is strange and oddly embarrassing, but it’s also undeniably tragic. Ricky isn’t the arbiter of truth, but the question of his inherent worth cuts both ways as Atkins forces the audience to accept him as the best tether to humanity they’ve got. How you engage with the character may say less about Atkins or Brown than it does about you as a consumer of media, and there’s something similarly compelling to be found in observing your own reaction to how “Sour Minnows” looks. In a moment when slick imagery can inspire suspicion about the use of AI, Atkins showing us the seams of his latest feature emerges as a subtly reassuring act. The same technological churn that’s making an original film like “Sour Minnows” harder to distribute is trapped inside the movie itself, but its roughness leaves behind evidence that real people made it. That feeling of appreciation becomes impossible to ignore when the credits roll and reveal that “Sour Minnows” is dedicated to the late filmmaker Jeff Baena. The 47-year-old writer/director died by suicide at his Los Angeles home in January 2025; he was the husband of actress Aubrey Plaza and Atkins’ longtime creative collaborator. Treating that dedication as a decoder ring for this film’s intentions would be presumptuous. But as an emotional clue, it’s devastating. Baena’s death meant something different to the people who knew him. But many film lovers have spent the 19 months since combing through Baena’s films, particularly “Joshy,” trying to understand his loss. Yes, AI can theoretically answer the question, “Who was Jeff Baena?” Hell, it’ll even remind you to call a hotline if you’re feeling the way so many people these days do. But a generated description cannot account for the psychic distance between the objective information available about a person, and the wonderful weirdness of truly knowing them. “Sour Minnows” dances around that gap, as Monica’s obituary becomes an old movie to torrent and would-be victims struggle to explain their role in feeding the nightmare they now face. Yes, Ricky is an AI trainer. He’s also a weed enthusiast, part-time artist, and maybe Aura’s boyfriend. Atkins pushes his lead to keep reaching for whatever those descriptions fail to contain, and Ricky’s inability to understand his agony mutates into a vehicle for incurring more of it. “You kind of have to get over asking why,” says one character (Julia Jones). “We manage it.” There’s grief in that sentiment, but a grotesque kind of liberation too. Whether Ricky is doomed by the events of “Sour Minnows” depends as much on how you see people like him as how you see the state of the world in 2026. And while it’s formally imperfect, Atkins’ latest is intellectually remarkable. Rather than diminishing danger by pretending to diagnose it, this unclassifiable, haunting effort ends on a note of bittersweet comfort — gently suggesting you’re not the only one losing your mind right now. “Sour Minnows” had its world premiere at Fantasia on July 24. It is still seeking distribution and will screen again on July 29. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. 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