Director: Chris Chan Roberson
Writer: Chris Chan Roberson
Cast: Rebecca Quinn Robertson, Madeline Barbush, Martine Baruch, Evie Brandford-Altsher
Running time: 1hr 45mins
Last year I reviewed Moerasdraak – a horror which presented itself as found-footage movie, but which felt much too put-together as a result. Of course, films in this sub-genre have to balance the ‘authenticity’ of presenting footage as though it has not been doctored, with the need to construct a story that audiences can actually engage with – but Moerasdraak went a bit too far in terms of enforcing its narrative; for example, it added in an instrumental score to steer our feelings on what we were seeing.
In contrast, Eleanor Slaughter has no problem staying true to the idea of being made entirely of found-footage; the way it has been very loosely mashed together means it very much feels like two – or perhaps three – disparate projects found in a bin somewhere, and hashed into a single release. That’s not necessarily for the best though, because it does not come close to providing a story that audiences can get their teeth into. That is partially because it over-prioritised ensuring the found-footage means seem realistic, at the cost of the ends; but also, I suspect, because writer/director/editor/actor Chris Chan Roberson has bitten off more than he could chew with the super-meta narrative at play.
Roberson plays a fictionalised version of himself onscreen, opposite the titular Eleanor Slaughter (Rebecca Quinn Robertson), in a story in which the pair compete to seize control of the narrative. Chris is looking to revive Eleanor’s career as a comedic actor – and his own career as a director and producer by proxy – with a documentary about her work on the comeback trail. Meanwhile, Eleanor seems conflicted about just wanting to be famous for the sake of it, and wanting to tell a more important story.
The pair were part of what, had it existed, would have been the most pretentious and irritating comedy troupe in history (and they would be up against some intense competition for that illustrious title). Among the old ‘comic’ stunts we are treated to, we get a tiresome slice of edge-lord 2010s internet humour about Jewish vampires; and an inane attempt of two members wearing Lena Dunham masks to berate a cab-driver into recreating a scene from Girls – both of which might have worked for someone a decade ago, but have aged like milk in the intervening years.
The trouble is, even if there were room for these alleged jokes in the bygone world, it is unclear how successful the troupe actually was. As fondly as Chris and Eleanor look back on those halcyon days, the only person who seems to recognise them for their old work is literally a paid plant. Meanwhile, where their footage aired is never specified, and the footage we see is mostly hand-held, leaving us to conclude it might have been a YouTube channel – and one which didn’t really take off, before the troupe imploded.
This segment of the film feels like it moves at a crawl, but it finally comes to an end when what we might usually take as the A-plot arrives. Eleanor’s comeback is stalling, as practically nobody is watching her skits posted direct to social media. Rather than take this as a sign that – even if the content was good – the over-saturated circuits of YouTube and traditional social media are no longer a good venue to launch a comedy career, Chris and Eleanor look for straws to clutch at. They find it when it turns out someone called Ellie Slaughter has recently risen to prominence on the site, for a student music video she made a decade ago. The similarity of their names, and their hashtags (and I know, discussing details like hashtags in a film is generally as interesting as watching paint dry), leads Chris to conclude she must be accidentally getting all Eleanor’s traffic.
Noticing that his efforts to ride Eleanor’s coat-tails back to fame might be slipping away, Chris pivots the film to become a documentary about mistaken identity, and arranges interviews with Ellie and her old team to try and hitch a ride from their rising star. Eleanor is unimpressed, but not half as upset by the scenario as Ellie – who has been trying to distance herself from that chapter of her life, and now works in some kind of legal business. During her sessions as the unwilling ‘star’, Evie Brandford-Altsher steals the show in spite of her character’s motives – giving one of the film’s only performances that feels genuine. Every blunt, standoffish answer comes with an air of desperate anger: how dare you show up to ruin my life for such trivial ends.
It is here that Roberson’s production flirts with becoming interesting – but also where it gets itself into the weeds. The way the characters address Ellie’s demeanour is markedly different: Chris is determined to simply edit her answers into anything that fits with his narrative, and gets Eleanor’s (or more accurately his) drive back to fame back on track. Eleanor meanwhile seems to be picking up on something deeper – that maybe Ellie is attempting to drive them away because her old music video is linked to something darker.
Dissatisfied with Chris’ rigid pursuit of tame entertainment, Eleanor takes matters into her own hands and secretly begins to produce her own documentary, starting with herself, but then shifting focus into Ellie’s story, and pushing interviews with her former friends, teachers and mother, to unearth allegations of childhood-exploitation and assault. We only see any of this when, half way through the film, Chris does some detective work of his own to get himself a copy of her version of the film – and what was initially narrated and edited by him suddenly switches to Eleanor’s perspective. When this segment ends, however, a third of the film is still left – and the narration does not return. So, whose perspective are we watching from now? Perhaps this is supposed to be the synthesis of the two world-views to finally give us ‘the unedited truth’ – but that truth is still built by the direction in which Chris in particular decides to point his camera.
It becomes increasingly troubling that anything he has to say is given equivalent value when a new plot strand is hastily introduced to wrap things up. It explains exactly why the old comedy troupe dissolved. One of the members had assaulted Eleanor – and Chris turned a blind eye to it, even when he pushed ahead with drawing them out of retirement. An under-developed series of vignettes explains how B. Emmett Porto (the appropriately slimy Martine Baruch) had abused his ‘celebrity status’ to harm Eleanor and get away with it, and how her alleged friend failed her when this happened.
By the time this sequence sputters to a conclusion – in which Eleanor has settled a law-suit, and taken a leading role in a blockbuster with B. Emmett – more muddled footage and angles have been smashed together in a way that somehow paints everyone as being as bad as each other; even when they conspicuously are not. Eleanor gets the worst treatment, and ends the film as chief villain, having seemingly used all of this to ensnare half the entertainment industry in a web of manipulation, merely for the sake of fame. The problem is that this conclusion seems to have been constructed by footage collected by Chris – a character who we now know conspired in covering up historic sexual abuse – and in the context of post-#MeToo Hollywood, that feels grotesque.
That might have been mitigated slightly if Roberson had bothered to tie this story back to Ellie’s. As a victim of abuse whose life has been upended by a fame she never sought, her take on the way things transpire would have been a much better way of summarising the situation and helping us draw conclusions about all the characters we are being invited to dislike – especially as, again, her performance is head-and-shoulders above the other actors here. But she has been erased from the story, with no opportunity to really speak her mind on things – just leaving us with a sub-Gone Girl worldview; a nihilistic narrative that everyone is a victim and a perpetrator, and will do literally anything to get what they want. That’s every bit as grim as it sounds – and while I am inclined to believe from the strange run-time, hodgepodge editing, that this is the result of over-ambition and carelessness, that’s carelessness which has been deployed to one of the gravest themes you can touch upon as a storyteller.
In a story where every main character is horrible and there is no discernible arc for anyone, it’s already hard enough to care about what’s going on. But when side characters are picked up and dropped just as they threaten to disrupt that tedium – one of whom is legitimately the best actor in the film – why should anyone care about this? Eleanor Slaughter never comes close to providing a compelling answer to that question.