Set in a blandly blissful cult-like community where love and sex have been chemically banished, Turn Me On is one of the left-field gems tucked away on the fringes of the San Sebastián Film Festival program this year. The second feature by US director Michael Tyburski, whose debut The Sound of Silence (2019) premiered to warm reviews at Sundance, this deadpan dystopian rom-com is based on a screenplay by Angela Bourassa. If the set-up sounds familiar, the Kristen Stewart-starring sci-fi thriller Equals (2015) had a broadly similar premise. But Tyburski seems to be aiming for something more witty, ironic and darkly droll, like a slightly milder American cousin of Yorgos Lanthimos. Following its world premiere in Spain, this off-beat indie charmer should find a sympathetic niche audience.
Fenced off from the outside world, the insular citadel society in Turn Me On is run by a corporate management team called Our Friends, who provide tastefully generic apartments, in-house jobs, life partners and even babies for all members. Everybody in this campus-like community ritually takes their daily “vitamin”, which suppresses all romantic and sexual feelings, as well as wiping away memories of their past lives. Human touch is forbidden, anger has been eradicated, and the TV screens broadcast smiley-faced graphics all day to help maintain the even-tempered mood. Nobody here is really living, just existing in a permanent state of comfortably numb semi-contentment. Citizens routinely greet neighbours and co-workers with the soothingly sinister refrain: “are you content?”
But discontent is brewing beneath the placid surface of this plastic paradise. Joy (British stage and screen star Bel Powley) is having medical treatment, which requires her to skip taking her “vitamin”, just for one day. Initially reluctant, she finds her curiosity pricked by the unfamiliar mood swings and hormonal urges that start flooding back when the chemical brakes are removed. After secretly suspending her daily pill, Joy persuades her cult-assigned life partner Will (Nick Robinson) to do the same. At first he is fearful, protesting “isn’t it better to be normal?” But he soon relents, after which the curious couple start having illicit sex for the first time. Spoiler alert: they love it. They then encourage their small cohort of friends to try swapping drug-addled celibate conformity for their thrilling new sexual hobby, which they cautiously christen “sync-ing” since the old vocabulary of lust has long fallen out of use.
Tyburski and Bourassa initially play these exploratory sexual scenes for maximum comic awkwardness. But they also become increasingly tense, as the return of erotic and romantic feelings ignite a dormant volcano of repressed emotion including violent jealousy, crushing heartbreak and previously hidden queer desire. Inevitably, enforcers for the Our Friends elite clamp down on Joy as the chief troublemaker, placing her in a tough moral quandary. A late plot twist, revealing the hypocrisy and cynicism of those at top of the community’s strict class system, adds an extra twist of sharp satirical critique.
Pitched by Bourassa as as a modern-day twist on Adam and Eve, Turn Me On is certainly more timeless fable than contemporary political allegory. Even so, the setting inevitably invites real-life parallels with numerous creepy New Age cults, not to mention Scientology-type religious groups and heavily controlled totalitarian societies like North Korea. In literature and cinema, dystopian classics like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), the early George Lucas sci-fi thriller THX 1138 (1971) and The Truman Show (1998) all come to mind.
Tyburksi and Bourassa leave a lot of questions unanswered in Turn Me On. They could have explained the origins of the Our Friends organisation much more fully, and delved far deeper into its sinister undercurrents, creating a kind of Handmaid’s Tale horror story. Instead they play a more teasing, ambiguous game with viewer expectations. In the real world, how many people would likely choose walled-off conformity over risky adventure, trading sexual abstinence for a trauma-free, emotionally stable, materially comfortable life? Probably more of us than we would like to admit.
Turn Me On is modestly scaled, and conventional it its own indie-drama way. All the same, it boasts a witty script, a fine ensemble cast and a charmingly quirky lead in Powley, who radiates the doleful, moon-faced magnetism of a live-action Vermeer painting. The upstate New York locations are also a terrific visual asset, with the abandoned Kodak headquarters in Rochester providing the perfect mid-century retro-modernist canvas, its majestic concrete contours mostly filmed in elegant static shots, and framed by lyrical cut-away views of the wooded mountain landscape around Lake Ontario. Nate Heller’s jaunty score, augmented by pre-existing classical and choral pieces, supplies an extra sheen of Lanthimos-lite mischief.
Director: Michael Tyburski
Screenwriter: Angela Bourassa
Cast: Bel Powley, Nick Robinson, Nesta Cooper, Justin H. Min, Julia Shiplett, Patti Harrison
Cinematography: Matt Mitchell
Editing: Matthew Hart
Music: Nate Heller
Producers: Sean Bradley, Zareh Nalbandian, Toby Nalbandian, Gregory Schmidt
Production company: Truant Pictures (US)
World sales: Film Constellation (UK)
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (New Directors)
In English
99 minutes
