The Dirties

Who are The Dirties? That’s the question the film itself wants its audience to ask, right from its opening statement. First, it fills the screen with the standard warning about graphic footage not being altered out of respect. In documentary style, it then introduces high school best friends Matt (Matt Johnson) and Owen (Owen Williams) as they attempt to make a shoot-em-up movie for a class project.

The film-geek outsider duo’s efforts spring from a culture of bullying that infects their school as it does all others, telling a tale of underdog revenge against the titular gang of antagonists. The characters’ on-screen alter egos wreak havoc against their tormentors; however their peers continue to subject them to the same treatment. Another expression of vengeance is obsessively planned, this time not constrained to celluloid.

Thus unravels The Dirties and its ambitious quest to defy categorisation yet provoke conversation in a smart satire of filmmaking and violence where nothing is off limits. Within the feature, Matt and Owen’s endeavours are borne of necessity but built on a love for the medium, both heightened by their status as outcasts. In the real-life formation of a teen shooting film about a teen shooting film that inspires more of the same, Toronto film school student Johnson employs affection and knowledge to craft an audacious meta movie as his first feature.

Part of the gambit of The Dirties purposeful, punkish playing with its content and shaping of in its message, stems from its aversion to making apparent which movie its components belong to. As it steps through the multitude of generalisations, clichés and tropes that apply to coming-of-age fare, manifestations of murderous deeds and the combination of both, the feature revels in the moments in which the parody becomes the plot and vice versa. It intentionally blurs the lines between its fictional and factual worlds – within an entire construction that exemplifies the former, of course – as a clever reaction to the pervading mainstream media logic of troubling material motivating errant behaviour. The joke and the statement in this approach, whether in pop-scored montages that paint a pretty picture of adolescent life, or in acts of aggression by the strong preying on the weak, are one and the same.

That a wealth of cinematic influences and references course through the feature’s veins is by design, of course, from the amplification of Heathers’ central concept to touching on an impressive and eclectic list that includes Trainspotting, Pulp Fiction, 21 Jump Street, Elephant, Back to the Future, The Goonies, Star Wars, Fight Club, The Shining and The Royal Tenenbaums among much, much more. That the wide range of movie touch points sample comedy as well as darkness is also a calculated, not coincidental, ploy, with the film itself a crafty combination of both.

For all its deliberation, authenticity writhes through The Dirties, in a rare product of careful planning, on-point production elements and the confidence of allowing improvisation within such a structure, all coming together. Shot at a real school with actual school kids, showing the jerky, hand-held style expected of homemade efforts, and teeming with dialogue that sounds honest because Johnson and Williams largely ad-libbed it on the spot, the film is bettered by always looking and feeling the part. Sometimes it smacks too loudly of its efforts and its messiness, even as both underscore its validity, but the film’s power is unmistakable. What the movie gets right, which is most of its snapshot of the genuine and exaggerated, cultural and press responses to intimidation and its depictions, it does so with astuteness and aplomb.