Another Hole in the Head 2025 Film Festival Coverage
The Hanged Man review
And you thought your family dinners were weird.
Festival movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
The Hanged Man
Directed by Korab Uka
Written by Korab Uka
Starring Perry Dell’Aquila, Gay Haubner, Danielle Keen, Carl Nowak and Max Pettit
The Hanged Man Review
The Hanged Man was probably the strangest movie I saw at the 2025 Another Hole in the Head Film Festival. That’s not the way you usually see a one location film heavy on dialog described…but it fits this one. Strange can mean a lot of things. In The Hanged Man it means a heavy dose of asking yourself, “what is the point of this, I wonder”. I asked that question several times…and never really came up with an answer. That’s not a complaint. The strangeness of this story is what makes it oddly compelling. Even if you walk away from it without much of an idea what the point of this was…it walks away with you all the same.
The story is very easy to follow. At first. Even if the characters are never given names. A doorman (Max Pettit) is invited to dinner by one of the families in his building. The family is comprised of a Father (Perry Dell’Aquila), Mother (Gay Haubner) and two young adult daughters (Carl Nowak and Danielle Keen). One of the daughters wears a mask which is oddly unsettling. Not the mask itself…it’s a simple white cloth one like a ski mask. Because it feels so out of place.
The dinner conversation is weird. The dinner…even weirder. Before long the Doorman finds himself on the ground being hovered over by some clearly sick people. That’s when things get weird. Yes…after the disgusting dinner quickly devolves into even more disgusting actions. If The Hanged Man was simply about a family of psychopaths exacting violence and twisted things upon their guest…it would have probably been a fine little movie. Nothing we haven’t seen before…but fine. The Hanged Man is very, very different than that. It’s most unsettling quality is how different from that it is. And really figuring out what the point of it was.
Instead of some family bonding over a helpless victim, The Hanged Man splits its cast up into individual short, one room stories of their own. In these rooms the doorman is sexually involved with each member of the family…and attempts to delve into some philosophical discussions about their true nature. Why are these disgusting people the way that they are? It’s an interesting angle. Why does it investigate these concepts through solemn set pieces revolving around post coitus discussion with their hostage? Like many thing in The Hanged Man…I don’t know. And that’s alright.
What I do know is that the Doorman we see in these four short, personal sequences is very different than the one we meet at the dinner. If I am to take the use of sex in this film as shorthand for putting these characters in their most vulnerable moments (and I have no idea if I’m supposed to), laying their soulless souls bare afterwards makes some sense. What never quite added up to me, however, was the point. If these philosophical discussions had a direct purpose in exposing the meaning of evil or why people do despicable things…it went over my head. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Even if I missed the point of The Hanged Man…it left an impression on me. The ambiguity certainly played a big part in that. I’m just glad that I don’t put scores on festival film reviews. Because I still don’t really know what I watched.
Scare Value
It’s hard to know who to recommend The Hanged Man to when I remain uncertain what The Hanged Man is. There’s an artsy style to it…but not an overly annoying one. It’s worth checking out just to see if you can make sense of it all. The conversations within may unlock something for different viewers. If it doesn’t…it might stick with you after you’ve finished watching anyway.
