The Scary of Sixty-First (Movie Review)

Basing a horror movie around “ripped from the headlines” social commentary is nothing new, but it’s hard to think of an example of it being done more directly and on-the-nose than THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST, which takes the very real and very recent atrocities committed by Jeffery Epstein and some of the world’s richest and most powerful men and uses them as fodder for a supernatural horror movie. Most movies might settle for nodding toward Epstein and maybe even namedropping him once or twice, but this movie puts him and some of his more notorious clients, most prominently Prince Andrew, right at the center of the movie. It’s undeniably audacious and arguably tasteless, but it’s also an intriguing idea that could lead to a one of kind horror movie with an unmatched feeling of recency and relevance. Unfortunately, THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST doesn’t deliver on the promise of its premise.

First time director Dasha Nekrasova is best known for her role on Succession as Comfry, the first rung on Cousin Greg’s date ladder, but she also hosts a “dirtbag left” political podcast which served as the inspiration for characters on another HBO show, the two disaffected hipster teenage girls on White Lotus. If those two characters made a horror movie, THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST is exactly what you would expect to get. It tries to evoke and even overtly swipes from classic movies like EYES WIDE SHUT, ROSEMARY'S BABY, and SUSPIRIA, but the movie it might have the most in common with is Kevin Smith’s TUSK, which famously started as a stoned joke on a podcast that was elaborated upon and escalated before finally being made into a movie almost on a dare. It’s not hard to imagine this movie starting out with someone saying “Wouldn’t it be crazy if we made a movie where…” and somehow the fates aligning so that something that probably never should have been more than a passing edgy joke got funded and realized into an actual movie that you can watch in a theater.

The film follows Noelle (Madeline Quinn) and Addie (Betsey Brown), two young women who find a surprisingly affordable Upper East Side apartment. It has some unusual features like locks on the outside of one of the bedrooms and strange tarot cards lying around, but its full dark history isn’t clear until a mysterious woman (Dasha Nekrasova) arrives and tells them that the apartment formerly belonged to Jeffery Epstein. Noelle falls into a rabbit hole of investigations and conspiracy hunting with the inexplicably unnamed woman (credited only as “The Girl”) while Addie faces more supernatural horrors as she finds herself in a possession-like state where she does things like role-playing as a 13-year-old during sex and masturbating with a picture of Prince Andrew. It’s probably a safe bet that during one of the aforementioned scenes a sizable chunk of the audience will turn off the movie. It’s some truly transgressive filmmaking, but the eternal question with any art that pushes the boundaries so hard will always be “was it worth it?” In this case, it’s hard to say it is. The script is half-baked and feels like it was dashed off without the kind of thought and care that the subject matter demands. The characters are all cyphers with unclear motivations who seem less like human beings than a bunch of performance art pieces strung together. It’s frustratingly possible to see glimpses of a good, maybe even great movie in this mess, but everything about THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST (including, but certainly not limited to its maddeningly ungrammatical and nonsensical title) feels like the movie idea a coked-up person at a party told you about that somehow actually became a reality.