Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Stress Positions’ on Hulu, Theda Hammel’s Highly Unconventional LGBTQ+ COVID Satire Starring John Early

If depictions of early COVID shenanigans haven’t worn you down to a nub, the satire Stress Positions (now streaming on Hulu) may be your tip-the-Uber-Eats-guy-generously, wipe-down-the-groceries-with-Clorox-wipes comedy jam. The feature debut of writer-director Theda Hammel, the film zooms in on a handful of Brooklynites as they try to figure out what to do with their egos in the context of a global pandemic. It wavers from viciously, flippantly funny to unfocused in a heavily artsy manner – almost certainly by design, leaving us to either just go with the smeary craziness or try to suss out an interpretive meaning. Either way, it might be rewarding.

STRESS POSITIONS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Terry (John Early) rolls a disco ball down the front steps of a Brooklyn brownstone. It’s massive. Unwieldy. It’s not an exaggeration to say he’s really wrestling with it. Symbolism alert: The giant glittering orb belonged to his ex-husband, Leo. Leo did the dumping. The divorce papers are inside and Terry hasn’t signed them. The brownstone belongs to Leo, who used it as a “party house.” It’s a beat-up but livable shithole. And Terry is stuck there. It’s 2020, early in the COVID pandemic. Terry is long unemployed and has the disheveled look – like the rudderless partying suddenly stopped and the hangover has yet to cease – and fractured demeanor of someone who thinks he’s unemployable. On top of that, stashed in the basement in a bed in his care is his nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), who broke his leg in a scooter accident and had nobody but his loser uncle to help him. 

All of Terry’s variously queer friends want to come over to see Bahlul, since he’s 19 and a model and of exotic origin – he’s Muslim; his father is Moroccan – and seems pretty innocently nubile. But of everyone in the movie, Terry takes COVID so seriously he douses a $20 with Lysol and dons a chemical-warfare gas mask before greeting the Grubhub guy, who starts off as a peripheral character, but frequency of his food deliveries necessitates making him, like, sixth- or seventh-billed. His name is Ronald (Faheem Ali). So visitors are verboten. Sometimes Terry lets their upstairs neighbor, Coco (Rebecca F. Wright) come down to fix the internet and smoke a cig with Bahlul, but Terry badgers everyone to mask up. Until the cigs come out, of course. Terry has no control around here. Let’s be real.

Terry does all the COVID stuff like trying his hand at recipes and banging on pots and pans in solidarity with first responders and wallowing in existential despair. He drops an uncooked chicken tender and slips on it, throwing out his back, and that’s the in for Karla (Hammel) to come over after weeks of badgering. She’ll give him a massage, she says, but instead she steals a bottle of vodka and lays out Bahlul on the picnic table and helps him stretch out his hips. Literally – it’s not overtly sexual, or come to think of it, maybe it is. Conversations with Karla are wild – everyone says stupid shit about Muslims (“Buhlal isn’t gay, he’s religious”) and the Middle East, even though nobody really knows what countries constitute “the Middle East.” Notably, Bahlul narrates some of this film for a book he’s writing, and it ties to flashbacks of his mother, Terry’s sister. Karla narrates some of it too, apparently because her S.O. Vanessa (Amy Zimmer) wrote a book all about Karla, The Trans Person and Karla needs to wrest back some control of her story. But control is an illusion, and don’t you forget it!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Stress Positions combines the COVIDisms of Locked Down with the queer flavor of Fire Island and the offbeat indie sensibilities of Shiva Baby.

Performance Worth Watching: Hammel plays a kind of offhanded agent of chaos, and her delivery of lashing comic dialogue draws the biggest laughs in the film.

Memorable Dialogue: Karla pithily sums up her transition, gesturing at her body: “I wanted to kill myself – this sort of helped.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing obvious, although there’s an out-of-frame implication of a heavy-duty battery-powered tool stuck in a specific bodily orifice – a battery-powered tool that isn’t designed to be stuck in a specific bodily orifice, mind you. 

Our Take: Stress Positions is a difficult film to like: Its characters are unknowable and frequently unlikeable, surely by design; Hammel’s screenplay has no use for conventional points-of-view; and her direction can be manic, handheld cameras thrashing about in tight spaces, showing no interest in establishing contextual visual boundaries beyond a prevailing sense of discomforting claustrophobia. Sometimes, Bahlul narrates over images of Terry’s pointless bustling in the apartment, and Hammel keeps us off-kilter with a variety of odd angles and distorted images. 

But it doesn’t fade from memory. In fact, it slowly becomes more than the sum of its rather disparate parts. Sure, Hammel satirizes the two extremes of COVID personalities in Terry’s hyper-paranoia and rote posturing (he really half-asses the pots-and-pans thing), and Karla’s unspoken whatevs approach to protocol, as extensions of their various forms of personal desperation. But beyond that, the characters’ inability to get the f— over themselves, even for a minute or two, to contemplate the rest of the world or consider the ignorance of their widely varied political views, puts a key idea in microcosm: This global pandemic didn’t bring us together, suffering as one. Rather, it was a splintering, an expose of people for who they really were. The crisis was an abstraction for many – and that’s the difference between the proliferation of a deadly virus we can’t see and, say, an earthquake where people are trapped under rubble, inspiring passersby to jump in and dig. 

Hammel makes sure everyone catches strays here – her depiction of trans and gay people surpasses their implied social and psychological suffering, insisting that queer folk can be self-centered assholes just like everyone else. Stress Positions consistently challenges us with its skewed, messy perspectives. It’s a hard movie to love, but one whose methodology and frame of reference are consistently fascinating.

Our Call: Stress Positions isn’t for everyone, but it’ll reward those who are up for the challenge. So STREAM IT, and look forward to Hammel’s future projects. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.