Final Rating: 3.5/5
Obie’s life sucks. His perverted boss just laid him off, even though he’s the only one who knows the codes. On his way to his date with his girlfriend, he gets hassled by the Salad Gang. When he finally meets up with his girlfriend Dorty, she dumps him to focus on her political career. She’s running for mayor so that people stop saying this town sucks.
And at Obie’s lowest point, a person appears who looks exactly like him, only that he dances. And that dance kills people.
“We call it the Dance Freak, because it sometimes dances in freaky ways.”
Dance Freak, which screened at Fantasia Festival, is a low-budget, surreal movie co-directed by Alan Resnick and Robby Rackleff. The two cut their teeth making short films for Adult Swim’s 3 AM “Infomercial” block. Like the absurdist horror-comedies that populated that timeslot, Dance Freak takes a blunt approach to writing and characterization that’s most interesting for what isn’t said rather than what is.
Resnick and Rackleff’s approach to horror places significant weight on aesthetics. The film feels like a horror film, utilizing unnerving music, uncomfortable camera angles, and a screenplay that hits all the right notes for the genre.
The world of Dance Freak has decayed to a point that feels almost familiar, but simultaneously unrecognizably strange. Characters have names like Megaman, Sleep Freak, Billy Value, Detective Gittit, as if the name is simply a funny afterthought for someone who exists only as a role.
The setting is a town that’s more imagined than constructed. Obie walks past houses and playgrounds with no sense of the distance between them, while Dorty’s political ads take place in empty cul-de-sacs. The town itself is described as a place that “used to be closer to a research facility than the next town over.” Right outside the town, there’s a “Wasteland” where former scientists now spend their time in fear of the Dance Freak.
In that strangeness, Dance Freak deals mostly in archetypes. Obie worked a corporate job sending “computer mails,” and was laid off for no discernible reason. Dorty’s political campaign has her using platitudes to compete against no one for control of a town everyone cares about but nobody likes. The science happening in the “Wasteland” threatens to destroy the town through the unwitting participation of scientists “just doing their jobs,” and without the knowledge of its citizens.
Resnick and Rackleff’s world in decline feels familiar and broadly relatable, despite—or perhaps because of—the lackadaisical approach to description. Like the worlds of Backrooms or Tenet, it’s a world wholly realized through an imperfect memory. In creating nowhere, the pair essentially create everywhere.
Dance Freak features performances that turn ridiculous material affecting. Rackleff as Obie comes across as a man on the brink of a nervous breakdown, having hit rock bottom and now dealing with the possibility that he may be an accomplice to a series of murders.
Megan Koester plays his girlfriend, Dorty, as a tough, no-nonsense woman who knows what she wants, despite her on-paper characterisation being deliberately thin. She’ll be confident in conversations, but stumbles when asked about her past. “It just happened, you know?” ends more than one conversation, as if the boundaries of her character never quite expanded beyond the here and now.
Stavros Halkias shines in a minor role as Obie’s drug-addicted boss Megaman. His introduction quickly establishes him as a lazy and perverted office tyrant, while he expounds in a later scene with the ridiculous story of how he became addicted to drugs. Like so many other character moments in the film, Megaman’s story has all the aesthetic trappings of a sad origin—wistful music, slow-motion relevant insert shots, writing that implies childhood trauma—but the actual substance is absurd.
Dance Freak feels like a half-remembered nightmare adapted as faithfully as possible. A story that needed to be told, but where the details have been obscured to the point of absurdity. There’s a standout sequence early on featuring a local gang, the Salad Boys, hanging out. The gang members ramble mostly incoherently over slowed down footage of them dancing, until one of them says “Someday, this world is gonna be a ruin, but our story is gonna live on.”
Dance Freak was seen during the 2026 Fantasia Festival. Thank you to the festival for the screener.
