THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST
US, 2021, 81 minutes, Colour.
Betsey Brown, Madeline, Dasha Nekrasova, Mark Rappaport.
Directed by Dasha Nekrasova.
This brief film will be of interest to audiences who like variations on horror themes as well as those who like to see small budget independent films.
The film was written and directed by two of the actors, Dasha Nekrasova and Madeline Quinn, with Dasha Nekrasova acting and taking the central role. The main focus is on the three women, some supporting men characters, including a boyfriend played by Mark Rappaport, not a particularly sympathetic or interesting character. The film is very much presented from a female perspective.
There are variations on the haunted house theme. Two of the young women are apartment searching in New York City, find an attractive but strange apartment (and real estate agent) and move in. While friends, one is edgy with some mental problems, the other simply acts on whatever whim takes her. The third woman appears at night outside the window, comes in the following day, states she is a researcher and is warning the women to leave the apartment. Then strange things happen in the apartment.
There are variations on the possession theme, the neurotic woman having all kinds of dreams and visions, strange and public sexual behaviour, and eventual leading to deaths and bloodshed.
The secret of the apartment is that it was owned by Jeffrey Epstein and used for his bizarre sexual encounters. We see some photos of him. However, his accomplice who was later arrested and tried, Ghislaine Maxwell appears in two sequences.
The strange woman says she is investigating the murder of Epstein in prison, not accepting that he committed suicide. She is an obsessed woman, then becomes obsessed with one of the women, sexual encounters, but tensions arising, the neurotic woman dead, a fight between the two other women and the woman of whims dead.
When the researcher returns to the apartment with the boyfriend, everything is clean, as if nothing had happened. Then she finds a note warning her off her research, indicating that whoever murder Jeffrey Epstein does not want any investigations.
The date at the end of the film’s 2019 – very quick moving for the screenplay and film considering that Epstein allegedly killed himself on August 10, 2019.
