$POSITIONS had its Quebec premiere on July 30 as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.

It is hard to shake the resemblance between Brandon Daley’s $POSITIONS and Benny and Josh Safdie’s Good Time. The two brothers at the center, the economically motivated premise, the ill-conceived choices, the propulsive synth score. The two films are so similar, in fact, that by the time this review goes live, every other person on the Internet will likely have already made the comparison.

The biggest difference between the two films is in the tone, where $POSITIONS is more overtly comedic. More specifically, it is a comedy of errors meets grossout comedy sort of cringe comedy. And its gags get so out of hand that it actively detracts from the surrounding scenes of high anxiety.

The film is invested in its protagonist Mike’s (Michael Kunicki) self-annihilation at the hands of cryptocurrency. When Mike’s crypto stock suddenly takes an upward swing, he impulsively quits his low-wage job. The ensuing and immediate failure to hang onto the funds leads to the increasingly dark reality of Mike’s poverty, a direct result of an addiction he doesn’t even realize he has. A proud teetotaler, Mike’s drug is the line going up and down on his phone. He is so hooked on it that he hovers his finger over the sell button each time the peaks peak, but he never cashes in.

The film’s comedy is, frankly, a detriment to its broader socioeconomic themes. Some scenes feel pulled straight out of the early-2000s American Pie cycle of grossout comedy. It doesn’t exactly play, though, when the beer bong of urine is sandwiched between scenes about a character coming to terms with the mortality of his parents. In general, the script appears to despise its characters. In the Safdies’ Good Time and Uncut Gems, the central figures are not the brightest and they are defined by their vices, but the films take great pains to illustrate why they do what they do.

Mike, on the contrary, is an idiot who is punished at every turn of the nasty script. The humor derives from the emasculation of cuckoldry, the contracting of HPV, erectile dysfunction, the embarrassment of being a virgin. It is the epitome of juvenile humor, and it is surrounded on all sides by bleak realities—the death of a parent, poverty, addiction, relapsing—that are used as props for the next desperate situation.

There is a fundamental theory of humor here. We laugh at those who we feel superior to. We revel in the misfortune of others. Banana peel; slip. It’s not a type of comedy I particularly enjoy in fiction, unless it is executed in the broadest manner. It particularly does not make sense to me here, where it is in conjunction with the grimier aspects of contemporary middle America. $POSITIONS is at best unfocused in its pursuit of some meaningful conception of financial dire straits. Many pieces of art have been made about the decline of the American dream. This is the first one I’ve seen that involves drinking mouthfuls of piss. At least there’s that.

$POSITIONS: C

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)