Film Review: ULTRASOUND: A Sci-Fi Puzzle That’s Also a Confounding Thrill Ride [Tribeca 2021]

Ultrasound Review

Ultrasound (2021) Film Review from the 20th Annual Tribeca Film Festival, a movie directed by Rob Schroeder, starring Vincent Kartheiser, Chelsea Lopez, Tunde Adebimpe, Breeda Wool, Bob Stephenson, Dana Lyn Baron, Jim Boeven, Mark Burnham, Cheryl Dent, Chris Dougherty, Porter Duong, Tony Evangelista, Gabe Fonseca, Chris Gartin, and Rainey Qualley.

I hate to become one of those critics who tells you to go into a movie blind, with as clean of a slate as you can. Not only does it undermine my job by offering me an easy way out of engaged analysis, but it also works as a subtle marketing ploy for the filmmakers so they don’t have to sell you on anything beyond a fabricated sense of mystique.

But alas, dear reader, I must turn against my better nature and shill out to Ultrasound’s marketing team, because it truly would be a disservice to divulge too much on the film and end up spoiling the bonkers mind-trip that it is.

I can, however, tell you how it starts, which is with a thirtysomething single man named Glen (Vincent Kartheiser) heading home from a wedding, and breaking down on a back-country road in the middle of the night. In particular, he runs a flat due to a makeshift spike strip being strewn across the pavement, but he doesn’t quite catch that detail as the sky suddenly starts pouring. He runs to the only house nearby to seek shelter, where thankfully the owners are home: the boisterious Art (Bob Stephenson), a man in his early fifties, and his wife Cyndi (Chelsea Lopez), a quiet woman in her early thirties. Glen is picking up odd vibes the whole time he’s there (not to mention a sort of mental fogginess), but he tries to ignore them as he’s simply gracious for the couple’s hospitality.

That is … until Art asks Glen to have sex with Cyndi.

Glen is rightfully shaken by the ask and vehemently declines, but upon incessant coaxing from Art he decides to at least go and talk to Cyndi … who also seems to be in on whatever Art’s strange cuckolding fetish is about. Cyndi opens up to Glen about her past, how Art was her former English teacher, how their relationship has since fizzled out, and how she regrets allowing herself to be taken advantage of at a young age. Glen takes pity on her, and the two spend … some sort of night together. In the morning, however, Art and Cyndi have vanished, and Glen is left alone to deal with his broken car. He hopes to put the whole incident behind him, until weeks later when Art shows up at his apartment unannounced with some shocking news in tow.

I know that right now you’re thinking this is just leading up to some weird kidnapping thriller tinged with body horror of the sex and pregnancy variety, but I’m here to tell you that you’d be … mostly wrong with that assumption. But that’s not a bad thing!

From there – and “there” in this context being the first 15 minutes or so – Schroeder and screenwriter Conor Stechschulte (who adapted it from his own comic series “Generous Bosom”) take Ultrasound through so many hard turns that you never really know where it’s going to go. Along the way, the duo knocks into such heady topics as memory and humanity’s penchant for persuasion/coercion, as well as the points where they intersect with power and other bodies of influence. Whether or not you find their revelations all that profound is ultimately up to you, but it shows the duo’s shared interest in thematic depth rather than simply hollow plotting, and part of the fun is allowing their work to thrash you about.

But just describing Ultrasound as a wild rollercoaster ride seems slightly disingenuous on its own, since Schroeder’s approach to the stark ambiguity of the film is so clean, tempered, and even demure. He keeps you in the dark for the better half of the runtime, with just enough light to let you vaguely make out his and Stechschulte’s ideas without losing interest. Not only is it a rollercoaster ride but it’s also a puzzle, one that you can’t truly make out its image until it’s nearly complete ­– and even then it’s as if they deliberately hid the last handful of puzzle pieces to throw you for a few more loops! Much of this is complimented by Zak Engel’s score and some brilliant sound design by Bobb Barito, which work wonders to keep this all tethered together.

And not only that, but the staunch committal of the entire acting troupe makes this so easy to watch despite the film’s strange construction. Kartheiser and Lopez are good audience proxies in their frazzled confusion and Stephenson is on some over-friendly-to-where-it’s-not-scary-but-is-definitely-unsettling level, yet the later supporting roles fulfilled by Tunde Adebimpe and Breeda Wool add accents of humanity to this otherwise cool narrative. Adebimpe and Wool, through their small nervous stutters and other random tics, emphasize the anxiety that exists within humans who wield even the smallest bit of power over others. In doing so, the filmmakers allow for further ruminations on the infallibility of self-perceived righteousness and human existence overall.

Ultrasound is a surprise sci-fi thrill ride that both benefits and revels in its own secrecy. Whether you’re a midnight movie fan or a genre die-hard, you’d do well to seek it out at your earliest convenience. Stay in the dark, and then get lost in its static.

Rating: 8/10

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