2025 Popcorn Frights Film Festival Coverage
Custom review
A couple makes a choice that bring about potential danger on a cosmic level.
Festival movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Custom
Directed by Tiago Teixeria
Written by Tiago Teixeria
Starring Abigail Hardingham, Rowan Polonski, Brad Moore and Samantha Steel
Custom Review
Custom is writer/director Tiago Teixeira’s debut feature following several short films. While I’ve never seen any of those previous films…I could feel the influence of a practiced short filmmaker at play in Custom. I mean that as a compliment. There’s freedom of experimentation in short films that is tough to translate into feature length. The obvious example of finding the ultimate success at it is David Lynch.
Eraserhead is the first feature film you’d point to if someone asked for a movie that feels like an experimental short film. But Lynch was, in my opinion, even more successful at experimenting within a standard narrative. Eraserhead is weird. Even if you love it…it’s weird. Purposely weird…but weird, nonetheless. What’s the second thing about Eraserhead that comes to mind after the world weird? I bet it was something also weird. Compare that to Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet has a far more standard narrative purpose. It’s also weird…but not only weird. Fire Walk With Me, Mullholland Drive, Lost Highway…Lynch was the master of marrying his weird ideas with stories you could pitch in an elevator. A young man stumbles onto a kidnapping. A doomed teenager faces the final week of her life. Hollywood dreams turn out to be a nightmare. … Maybe I can’t do Lost Highway.
When I start talking about my love of David Lynch one of two things happens next. Usually, I’m about to tell you that someone tried to capture a bit of that Lynchian (a word I hate and use anyway because you know what it means) magic and failed spectacularly. Far less often I get to tell you that someone managed to do it. Custom veers closer to the latter but I brought this all up for a different reason. Specifically, the part between Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. Lynch made two movies in between those films. Oscar nominee The Elephant Man and near career killer Dune. Lynch’s two forays into studio filmmaking went in completely opposite directions. But Dune’s failure is one of the best things that could have happened to Lynch’s career. He never gave up final cut again…and we got a string of fascinating films a result.
Custom feels like a movie that should have been made between Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. I’m not talking about it in terms of quality or claiming that Custom is some lost Lynch classic…I mean the form of the thing. It’s not the full on experimental nightmare that Eraserhead is. It’s not as polished or confident as Blue Velvet…but it does contain a story you can explain quickly. Think of it like George A Romero’s The Crazies. It came out halfway between his two masterpieces Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Despite not being set in the same world or feature traditional zombies…it very much feels like the missing link between the two. It’s also not nearly as good as those movies…which is fitting for where we are in our discussion about Custom.
Custom is pretty good. “Not bad” would be another way to say that. It’s completely unfair that I’ve been comparing it to classics and masterpieces. It’s a small, focused story that teases something on a potentially cosmic scale. It does this through cool, dark visuals that become more surreal the deeper we go. The premise involves a couple who turn to making custom pornography for money…and the shadowy client paying them a fortune to carry out his strange requests. What’s even stranger is that neither Jasper (Rowan Polonski) nor Harriet (Abigail Hardingham) can remember exactly what they have done. A look at the footage reveals something sinister and dangerous may be at play. Perhaps even demonic or cosmic in nature.
Jasper becomes obsessed with discovering what’s going on. It takes a large emotional toll on him…and that’s before he starts understanding the cryptic messages their client is sending to him. Custom mixes a straightforward narrative with surreal concepts and results in something that feels completely original. It’s small in scale…grounded by the couple it’s focused on. But it’s large in scope. There’s a lot we don’t know about what’s happening…but all signs point to something outside of our understanding. Jasper’s investigation starts to yield results…and swings Custom towards an ending that I really liked. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea. I could see viewers asking “is that it” after waiting so long to get to an answer. But I thought it worked wonderfully.
And that’s, in no small part, due to where I think Custom exists on that Lynchian scale. More accessible than an experimental film. Less accessible than a standard narrative film. The step between those two places isn’t visited that often. Custom does a pretty good job with it. A not bad job would be another way to say that.
Scare Value
Custom‘s dark story is matched by its dark aesthetic. The further the couple gets into the story…the more surreal the story becomes. Or, at least, they discover how surreal it has been all along. The movie hints at bit ideas while keeping the focus small and personal. The dynamic works very well, making Custom a curiosity worth checking into. I think it sticks the landing perfectly…but I can imagine some will feel like part of the story is missing. That’s kind of what I liked about it.
