Most of us still cringe when we hear the phrase “COVID movie,” not because it’s “too soon,” but because seemingly every angle of the pandemic, of lockdown, of vaccine paranoia has already been dramatized. We’ve had dramas about how social isolation is bad, thrillers about lockdown home invasion, horror movies about the next transmittable contagion beyond our dimension. After four years we’ve kind of covered it, and, frankly, it’s not a subject that many people necessarily want to keep revisiting. Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions, on the other hand, manages to be a COVID movie without being a “COVID movie,” using the pandemic as mere backdrop for a slyly hilarious comedy about life on pause.
It’s the early months of lockdown in New York, an anxious time for the residents of what was then an epicenter for disease transmission. Still, everyone has other shit to deal with. Exasperated Terry Goon (Hammel’s frequent collaborator John Early) is steadfastly refusing to look at the divorce papers from the ex-husband whose brownstone Terry is still living in while playing host to his nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a half-Moroccan model recuperating from an injury while picking apart his racial and gender identities. Then there’s Karla (Hammel), a trans woman whose girlfriend Vanessa (Amy Zimmer) stole her life story for the plot of her bestselling novel and is hard at work on another one while Karla wonders if they should separate. Terry’s upstairs neighbor Coco (Rebecca F. Wright) thinks COVID is fake, and delivery driver Ronald (Faheem Ali) flirts with everyone coming in and out of Terry’s building.
It would be enough without the added stress of a miasma of viral particles that may or may not be blasting out of everyone’s mouths, but the COVID stuff is sprinkled in tastefully, like Marvel movie references to a very specific 2020 urban experience: masks, disinfectant spray, stockpiles of disposable wipes, contactless food delivery, 7 p.m. pot-clanging, ambulance sirens, daytime fireworks, Maldon salt. It enhances rather than distracts from the characters and their perpetual circular anxieties, grounding everything in a time period that altered us all. Lockdown was an interior time; we were closed off inside our homes, inside our minds, free to imagine what alternate lives we could be leading if we could just get out of the house. The only company we had was our own slightly megalomaniacal self-narration, which pops up in Stress Positions as the characters take turns providing their own meditative voice-overs explaining events.
