The God Inside My Ear is a 2018 sci-fi film about a young woman who discovers a world of conspiracies, strange voices and horrifying visions after experiencing a peculiar and sudden breakup with her boyfriend.
In what’s probably a bit counter-intuitive in how you think movies are made, often the less money a filmmaker has in bringing their vision to screen the less restrictions they have in doing so. Independent directors working with low to no budgets tend to take the biggest risks, pushing narratives and imagery in all kinds of twisted directions, free from gaggles of studio heads forcing them to tow the line as it were. I’m not saying that writer/director Joe Badon‘s shoestring debut is all that revolutionary, nor is it particularly innovative, but what he does with what he’s got is pretty damned impressive, and as such, puts together a decidedly screwy little gem that deserves a little celebration.
Break ups suck. We all go through them, the heartbreak something we all deal with in our own way, from bouts of indulgent overeating and late night bing watching to sleepy depression or credit card swelling shopathons at the local mall. For young impressionable Elisia Cummings (Linnea Gregg), it’s something a little more, well, unsettling. Her boyfriend Fred (Joseph Estrade) is on a spiritual journey of sorts and needs to be free of entanglements to do so, leaving her utterly broken by the sudden rejection. Believing that she’s a host to something deep inside her that is growing within, she begins to have an assortment of highly peculiar experiences, including a conversation with the neighbor’s dog and a persistent talking garden gnome. And there’s the telemarketer who keeps calling, seemingly knowing everything about her upside down life. Is it the voice of God? Or is there something darker slowly closing in.
No matter the density of Elisia’s cryptic journey, it is Badon’s freakish visuals that inspire the most questions, his constantly evolving spectacle of nightmarish gateways, neon flashes, angular diversions and more slowly making the decent into this abyss all the more convincing. Badon’s story is at times almost purposefully unreachable, but his jarring imagery – even so psychedelic – is wonderfully restrained, just weird enough to be inviting but not so saturated as to be distracting. Elisia is cast into some sort of ethereal plane of crazy and while it most certainly looks tempting to go way over board, Bardon is wise enough to keep it centered on the personality rather than the effects. It’s a smart choice.
Newcomer Gregg is clearly fearless, the young actress absolutely sunk into the belly of Elisia, oh so delicately tip-toeing along a thin line of genuine breakdown and campy delight. This is not always easy to keep track of, but her wide-eyed blank expression is endlessly watchable, anchoring us to this admittedly way left of center fall down the rabbit hole. She’s got this dark, magnetizing quirky appeal that makes lines like “I am not available for questioning” cut like a razor.
The God Inside My Ear is not all that accessible, though that’s surely half the point. Badon has quite the story to tell, yet the pins in the map are far, far apart, and by the time it comes to its payoff, many may wonder just what the heck they were watching. For fans of such, that’s a good thing, the film a full page invitation for interpretation, one that I know I’ll be stewing over a good bit from now. Badon knows his audience, steers well aside of mainstream, and offers up a wonderfully chaotic head trip that should earn him plenty of opportunities to do more. Either way, any filmmaker who put in their film a clothing store called the Fashion Style Mart Hut automatically gets points.