Cinema will always have a place for degrading cringe comedy. I don’t use that genre label as a pejorative; plenty of talented filmmakers have depicted miserable people committing miserable deeds. If it’s built on a kernel or sympathy or injected with some sort of irony, all the better. We see this mode in scuzzy cinema fairly frequently — Funny Pages from 2022 is a recent highlight — but this breed of comedy has really found a following on TV. Childrens Hospital and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are wells of dark comic pleasure if that’s your thing.
Max DeFalco’s Anything Helps operates in that comedy sphere, and it has an element of transgressive cynicism and indie grit to it that feels like a snapshot from an especially acerbic Sean Baker film. The short follows a desperate dad named Doug (Adam Rosenblatt), recently separated from his wife and in financial straits. He’s living in a tiny motel apartment underneath a prostitute named Sunshine (Quinnlynne Valley) whose noisy sex echoes through paper-thin walls and shakes dust off the ceiling. For no clearly given reason, his arm is in a sling.
Doug is desperate to reconnect with his son, but it’s not only his questionable living conditions driving them apart, but his lack of employment. The film sympathetically and cruelly suggests his wife (Stevie Kincheloe) left him in part because of his inability to provide financially ; he suffers from a financial impotence of sorts. Underneath the blistering, squirmy comedy of Doug’s downfall lies the observation that economic cruelty can ostracize a normal person into something grotesque.
Indeed, the scheme that Doug lands on is something you’d probably call grotesque: After witnessing a cancer patient earn both kind sympathy and wads of cash while begging, he shaves his head and pretends to be a cancer patient. (He hilariously tells his former wife that he “got a job” and has “serious money” when she confronts him.) The film triggers a brief twinge every time Doug confronts someone asking for money. Perhaps they’ll see through his lie, whether they notice his bushy eyebrows he refused or forgot to shave, or see his buzzed hair growing back in; or else they’ll give him a few dollars to validate his sad scheme. Both outcomes feel like a loss in one way or another.
DeFalco carves his own voice with Anything Helps, but the most recent Academy Award winner for Best Director, Sean Baker, is clearly an influence: Anything Helps has the sweaty realism of a Baker film, the same unflinching depiction of sex work, and similar texture and editing. The motel it’s set at could just as well be the one from The Florida Project. Baker leans more towards drama than DeFalco strives for, but it’s easy to see how an extended version of this mode could result in a complex portrait. (DeFalco cites observations of “chaotic” everyday life as his source of inspiration on his website.)
The film’s craft is pitched perfectly for the story: DeFalco keeps the story lean, giving us just enough to flinch at Doug’s spiral, with a mix of handheld closeups and medium shots that flow steadily under the editing of Riley R. Scott. The acting is fearless, with Adam Rosenblatt in particular leaning into Doug’s humiliation with no self-pity.
The overall effect of Anything Helps is a filmmaker with confidence in exactly the story he wants to tell and the tone he wants to tell it with, and the mature filmmaking voice to achieve that vision. Anything Helps is appealingly raw and bleakly funny. DeFalco has directed a couple of other shorts, and his website says he is in production on a feature-length film called Ten Will. I look forward to seeing what his voice looks like on an extended canvas.
Anything Helps (8 min) is streaming for free on NoBudge.
Anything Helps is written and directed by Max DeFalco, a writer-director from Long Island working in Los Angeles. His other short films include Follow Me Wherever I Go and The Consequences of Taking Without Asking. You can find his website here.
Crew credits include Riley R. Scott as editor, Brandon D. Hill as cinematographer, Lydia Gallegos as production designer, Jacob Flack as sound designer, and Kali Bateman as colorist. Cast includes Adam Rosenblatt as Doug, Jano Andre as Marv, Quinlynne Valley as Sunshine, and Stevie Kincheloe as Sophie.
Dan Stalcup is the film critic for The New Cinephile and The Goods. Reach him at dan.stalcup@gmail.com.