Now on Hulu after getting a brief theatrical run in late 2021, The Beta Test is Jim Cummings’ follow-up to 2020’s well-received indie horror-comedy The Wolf of Snow Hollow. This time, the director/writer/actor shifts tones, crafting a satirical thriller that’s not about spoofing a genre, but rather, sharpens its claws on social media and the politics of the entertainment business. It’s a bit of a conceptual risk; let’s see if Cummings pulls it off.
The Gist: This woman, she looks nervous. She dials 911 to report a domestic incident, but it hasn’t happened yet. Curious. Then she breaks it to partner of 10 years that it’s over, possibly because he’s an exacting jerk who belittles her, although we can’t be sure. His response is to stab her, choke her and throw her off a balcony. EXTRA curious. Next we meet Jordan (Cummings). He and his best bud PJ (PJ McCabe) work for a bigwig Hollywood talent agency. Jordan quit drinking a few years ago, and is engaged to Caroline (Virginia Newcomb). The wedding is in six weeks. One day he gets an invitation in the mail for a “no strings attached sexual encounter” in a hotel room. It’s all purple with elaborate script — very fancy. He looks at it, looks at it again, looks at it again and throws it in the trash before Caroline can see it. But before long, he’s fishing through the dumpster. He checks off his preferences on it, and the one that stuck out to me said “face sitting.”
At this point, it’s not difficult to discern that Jordan is a lunatic, possibly in the middle of some psychological crisis. His conversational method involves frequent interruptions of others and chattering endlessly in run-on sentences over the top of them. He’s very open about the state of his ulcer. He vapes SUPER HARD. He treats his inferiors at the office like shit. We get a montage of Jordan at work meeting a variety of clients and saying how “excited” he is to work with them. “Excited!” “Exciting!” “Excited!” he exclaims, over and over again. He greets a potential Chinese client by saying, “Ni hao the hell are you?” Is the agency successful? Who the hell knows. Smoke and mirrors have nothing on this. Jordan’s a $3 bill. He’s such a loathsome phony, he’d make Holden Caulfield suffer an instantaneous and fatal aneurysm. Caroline needs to flee. Flee, Caroline, flee!
Well, Jordan goes to the hotel room at the scheduled time, dons a blindfold as requested, enters, and gets his face sat on. By a beautiful woman, also blindfolded. Afterwards, as the wedding looms, and Caroline somehow tolerates his baldly neurotic damage, he secretly obsesses over the who and how and why of this erotic rendezvous — which seems to be linked to the murders he heard about in the news, e.g., the woman who got chucked off a balcony. He impersonates a private detective, harasses people, starts drinking again, hiiiiiiiiiiits the vaaaaaaaaaaape and engages in enough Hollywood inside baseball to make him a first-ballot inductee in the Dickhead Hall of Fame.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This slashy black-comic Hollywood satire wouldn’t exist without Robert Altman’s The Player or George Huang’s Swimming With Sharks.
Performance Worth Watching: Cummings’ performance is the focus here, and he’s mesmerizing, characterizing Jordan as a bundle of tics with no solid moral or psychological ground to stand on.
Memorable Dialogue: “We just signed Tiger Woods as a director, they’re gonna remake Caddyshack with dogs.” — Jordan
Sex and Skin: Faces get sat on; female toplessness; male bottomlessness in dim lighting.
Our Take: Conflict: I frequently was drawn in by Cumming’s performance, which is nuts in a fresh — and exciting! Very exciting! — way. I also felt pushed away by movie-biz in-jokes, which overwhelm like pelting sheets of rain; I caught some of them, missed just as many and laughed at a few, but they all felt indulgent. The Beta Test very much feels like the work of Hollywood fringe artists who aren’t sure if they want to participate in the bogus reindeer games that would put them among the industry’s successful elite. There are Marvel-movie jokes, references to “Harvey” (as in “Weinstein”) as if he was a cautionary tale and a bevy of subtle #MeToo nods, case in point, this withering bit of dialogue: “Adultery’s down. Drastically.”
The film’s thriller component appears to be calculated to inspire more questions than answers. Cummings and co-writer McCabe toss in a partially realized bit of commentary about the destructive nature of corporate data mining via social media, and resolve the mystery with little more than a “huh” and a shrug. More compelling is its depiction of compulsiveness, paranoia and anxiety, which burst out the seams of the Jordan character, who’s a bundle of chaotic energy seeking release, Cummings playing him as a malfunctioning machine busting its springs. No wonder he’s so fixated on that one night of deeply satisfying, anonymous sex — every other moment of his life, he’s trying to be someone else. So does Hollywood draw in the phonies, or are real people transformed into phonies by Hollywood? Tough call.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Beta Test doesn’t quite come together as a fully realized thriller or satire, and it may alienate audiences that aren’t steeped in the ins and outs of the entertainment business. But it’s a work inspiring odd fascination, Cummings keeping us off-balance with his performance and a bevy of provocative ideas.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
