Dance Freak is screening as part of the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Obie (Robbie Rackleff) wants to build a birdhouse in his birdhouse-building class. Obie’s girlfriend Dorty (Megan Koester), who’s a popular candidate in the mayoral race, just dumped him. The Salad Boys (Allen Cordell, Adam Enders, Sarah Sherman) recently force-fed Obie a concerning amount of salad. Obie has been told that a man dancing freakily out in the parking lot—a Dance Freak, if you will—has made himself “available” to Obie. Obie is being investigated for murder.
Thus is Dance Freak, the debut feature film from Alan Resnick and Robbie Rackleff. It is a surrealist comedy with horrific undertones, although these descriptors do little to describe the feeling and atmosphere of the film.
Rackleff (who also writes and stars) and Resnick were previously members of the Baltimore-based arts collective known as Wham City. Resnick is perhaps best known for his contributions to Adult Swim’s series Infomercials (namely, Unedited Footage of a Bear). The duo, along with other Wham City members like Ben O’Brien, Cricket Arrison, and Dina Kelberman, have a surreal comedic style that blends the absurd and the off-putting.
Dance Freak operates in this same vein. The aesthetic is disorienting. Frame rate manipulation, garish lighting that emphasizes white tones, and low-grade digital effects make the space of this town (which most characters angrily describe as awful) feel disquieting and divorced from reality. It is not a pleasing aesthetic, but it is one I took a shine to very quickly. Scenes feel like you are swimming upstream through molasses while in a drug-fueled haze. For Obie, it is as though the entire world is fighting against him; nearly everyone is antagonistic and violent toward him. This character and the viscosity (for lack of a better word) of the aesthetic combine to give the film the feeling of a nightmare—David Lynch comes to mind here, although I always hesitate to use the over-used “Lynchian” to describe it.
Rackleff is commendable for each hat that he wears on this production. While the experience of watching feels like the sort of dream where you are compelled to run but your feet take you nowhere, the script is certainly not slow. Obie is propelled through this hellish space at a nice clip, giving plenty of opportunity for the world to take on an adequately sour flavor (and also opportunity for different comedic performers to have a scene or two of anti-comedy bravura—special mention to the three “Salad Boys” and Connor O’Malley). Meanwhile, as a performer Rackleff is effective at filling two very different roles—the beaten and broken Obie who pitifully putters around the space, and the erratic and (literally) electric Dance Freak squashing people’s heads into deflated basketballs.
Equally laudable is Megan Koester, whose Dorty is an endlessly odd and contradictory character that is nevertheless played for depth by the performer. Dorty is at times the compassionate voice of reason and at others as antagonistic as anyone else. Elements of the character simply don’t make much logical sense together, yet it all coheres thanks to Koester’s capable, and very funny, performance.
Dance Freak is a tough recommend, simply because its approach to comedy will come off to some as purposefully non-comedic. To call it anti-comedy, though, would be to ignore the genuinely funny stuff packed inside these 97 minutes (for instance, Resnick composed an expletive-laden song that is completely inappropriate for the emotional tenor of the scene it is in). Those who are already well-versed in Resnick, Rackleff, and Wham City’s brand of comedy will likely get a lot out of this. Those unfamiliar could seek out some material freely available online before deciding if they think Dance Freak is right for them (I recommend What Codec Should I Use? by Resnick, or this video by Rackleff, or this).
Dance Freak: B+
As always, thanks for reading!
—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd)
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