Slice (2018)

Warning: vague spoilers are still spoilers to some, apparently!

So, the charming town of Kingfisher, USA always has had a large population of ghosts – who in the world of this film work jobs, eat pizza, and act pretty much like the living and only look rather the worse for wear – mostly thanks to part of it having been built on the grounds of an old asylum. Of course.

The town’s mayor Tracy (Chris Parnell) has “solved” the societal tensions that come with this sort of thing by shunting the ghosts off into their little parallel town that at the same time does and does not belong to Kingfisher. You might see some slight parallels to the way things in our world operate, there. Anyway, a mysterious killer starts murdering pizza delivery persons all working for the same pizza place in ghost town. The police’s main suspect is one Dax Lycander (Chance the Rapper), a werewolf who has just recently returned to town. Dax, you understand, was also the main suspect in a series of Chinese food delivery people killings some years ago. And wouldn’t you know it, the pizza place of today is in the same building the Chinese restaurant was in!

However, Dax doesn’t really seem to be the perpetrator, something various people, like reporter Sadie (Rae Gray), and former pizza delivery woman looking for vengeance for a murdered friend Sadie (Zazie Beetz) soon also cop to. Also involved are a political conspiracy that turns out to be an occult one, a cheese-themed drug lord, one werewolf-hating cop and one who doesn’t and just possibly a gateway to hell.

I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if writer and director Austin Vesely’s off-beat urban fantasy horror comedy was pretty much like marmite to most anyone viewing it. It’s a film with a very strong personality, but that personality is also a decidedly peculiar one, feeling like something made by people who are perfectly alright with making a small film by their own rules, without much thought given to it being for everyone potentially going to watch it.

I found myself rather smitten with most of what was going on in the movie, really enjoying the film’s readiness to create a wild genre mix without making any gestures at being wild. For as strange as some of the film’s ideas get from time to time, things feel personable and personal rather than ironically distanced and constructed. The film’s sense of humour is certainly off-beat and won’t be to everyone’s taste (even though I just find it incredibly charming) but it does not seem to have a mean-spirited bone in its body, never going for the cheap way of putting anyone down. Which really fits the idea of community Slice presents, where problems are solved only when people of different social strata and races come together and just try to fix things the best they can.

I also found myself admiring the film’s approach to world-building, taking a silly or slightly goofy idea and then running with it in a serious manner; it is still a very strange world this takes place in, but one whose strangeness feels organic, all of it belonging to the same sort of place, and even making sense if you just look from the right angle. And unlike in many another off-beat comedic film, there’s also an actual constructed plot with quite a few moving parts which in the end do come together sensibly to find here. It’s just that the moving parts do – again – come from a slightly off-beat sensibility.

On the visual side of directing Vesely – whose first feature after a couple of videos for Chance the Rapper this is - does seem heavily inspired by right now trendy late-80s/early 90s filmmaking, but he is so in a good way, not actually aiming for a nostalgic feeling at all, at least in my eyes. It looks more as if the director’s personal style is rooted in that era, and he’s neither apologetic nor defensive about it. Plus, the visual artificiality that comes with this approach does lend itself to this sort of low budget affair, helping things look stylish instead of cheap even if they are indeed cheap.

The film – despite in theory containing all the elements of such a thing – never feels like it is aiming for any kind of instant cult appeal either, but rather comes about its actual cult appeal naturally by being the product of minds with sensibilities rather apart from the mainstream. It’s natural strangeness instead of a constructed one, if that makes sense. This organic feeling to on paper disparate elements repeats when it comes to the film’s more or less in-built social commentary concerning only very slightly masked class and race divisions; they are just a part of the world this takes place in, so the film never feels preachy when it acknowledges these things but unwilling to pretend these divisions do not exist, or are not worth talking about.

Most of the cast is playing all of the film’s ideas and their characters absolutely straight, both Beetz and Gray keeping the weirder moments grounded in what feels like actual humanity, while Chance goes about everything charming and relaxed (there are worse things a rapper could build an acting career on) but not Snoop Dogg-relaxed, while only the villains and the dead are really allowed to be a little bit more out there – which makes perfect sense.


As does, curiously enough, most of what’s in this strange and charming little film.