Theda Hammel’s directorial debut, “Stress Positions” is a head-spinning comedy that takes place in the throes of pandemic hell. Terry (John Early) is a recent divorceé holed up in his ex-husband’s dilapidated party house while taking care of his 19 year old nephew, Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a Moroccan model and the son of his estranged sister. Terry’s good friend, Karla (Theda Hammel) lives across town with her girlfriend Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), a writer who Karla resents for capitalizing off her trans experience as fodder for her novel.
The script, co-written by Hammel and Faheem Ali (who plays a flirty Grubhub delivery guy in the film), threads this group of millennial cohorts together with delicious chaos and delirium. The day to day antics of the group mostly include Terry dodging Karla’s festish-y curiosity about his nephew, scrambling to mask up for frequent deliveries, desperately cleaning, and begging Coco (Rebecca F. Wright), his Covid-denier upstairs neighbor, to fix the WiFi. Yet throughout the film, there’s also dreamlike narration of journal entries written by the characters, giving us deeper perspectives into their histories and feelings.
If one thing is to be known about the cast of characters in “Stress Positions,” it is that they are grossly unreliable, self-absorbed, and ignorant. They are representative of a very current trend in liberalism, one that Hammel is critiquing within her own millennial generation. They are aware of the buzzwords and headlines, but echo these sentiments without bothering to engage beyond the surface. One hilarious recurring bit is that Terry and Karla make blanket claims about the Middle East without having the slightest idea of what it is. They constantly mistake Bahlul’s native Morocco for being geographically included, habitually mistake Iran and Iraq, and conflate hijabs, burqas, and niqabs. However, despite being wrong every time, the group never considers ceasing their discussions of a topic they clearly don’t understand.
Hammel and Ali’s incisive script is a cutting critique of the thinness and righteousness of political engagement in the age of social media. It is also side-splitting in its unforgiving slap-in-the-face comedy. Early’s performance is hilariously physical. Between frantically dousing the home in Lysol, helmeting himself with Chernobyl-esque gas masks, and clumsily bounding around with a herniated back, he never misses an opportunity to employ his body as ridiculous means to a riotous end. Hammel’s comedic performance is put into effect mostly through her quips, one-liners, and generally malicious demeanor. Karla is selfish and spiteful, willing to bite into those around her to feed her own ego, but she’s also undoubtedly funny in doing so. The hilarity of “Stress Positions” is helmed by the unlikeability of its cast and what their flaws reveal about the world around them.
While the idea of a film set in the pandemic is sure to raise skeptical eyebrows, Hammel puts the locale of Covid-era United States to good use. It was a time when holed up in our homes, we had little to engage with aside from the internet. There were social reckonings and protests at every turn, and it was a period when we all engaged with socio-political contexts and consequences obsessively and without escape. For the most part, it was a time when we were listening more than speaking, and allowing oppressed voices to speak their story uninterrupted. “Stress Positions” is as much about lazy politics as it is about the ownership of a story and the levels of privilege when it comes to possessing a dominant perspective.
Karla as a trans woman had her story stolen and sold by her cisgender girlfriend. Bahlul, in discussing queerness and his dislike of being photographed, is constantly pummeled by the inaccurate and disengaged projections of the white people who surround him. They spend more time arguing over whether he’ll be thrown off a roof for being gay in the Middle East (despite his constant reminders that Morocco is not in Asia) than they do listening to him. There’s sighfully depressing realities that motivate the comedy of “Stress Positions,” but Hammel does an excellent job at balancing the oppositional forces of each, creating a film that is takes pride in its tumultuous telling of the truth.
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