“Man, I work for an app,” scoffs a bike courier midway through The Beta Test, neatly summing up the subtext of this horror-comedy patched into a matrix of technocratic misanthropy. The title refers to an ad hoc data-mining scheme targeting wealthy entertainment-industry players that baits them into anonymous trysts with algorithmically compatible partners and then shakes down both parties in the aftermath. After a knowingly gratuitous, quasi-De Palma-esque cold open observing the bloody consequences of such cuckery, we meet Hollywood packaging agent Jordan Hines (co-writer-director Jim Cummings), who’s received a deep-purple envelope containing a questionnaire about his sexual preferences and fetishes—an engraved invitation designed to lead upwardly mobile, soon-to-be newlyweds like himself into temptation.
It’s a short push, of course, and the ease with which Jordan’s one-track mind gets rerouted by the promise of a commitment-free fuck behind the back of his Type-A fiancée, Caroline (Virginia Newcomb), is surpassed only by the stress he suffers in the aftermath. Our antihero emerges from his luxury-class thirst trap in a fugue state of paranoia, guilt, and a halting, inchoate rage that’s belied—but only barely disguised—by the shit-eating noblesse oblige that defines the vapid, Jeremy Piven-in-Entourage cosplay of his job, which is itself a kind of fugue state: “We’re ex-cited” is Jordan’s mantra, repeated over and over in the same placating cadence to the point of meaninglessness (his other go-to is “Let’s keep talking”). As in his other multi-hyphenate features, the 36-year-old Cummings—a catalogue-handsome, Louisiana-born go-getter who trawled through the shorts-festival trenches for several years before achieving DIY poster-boy status with the microbudget, tragicomic Thunder Road (2018)—has now made three consecutive movies about excitable men failing their own private beta tests. That he hasn’t yet suffered the law of diminishing returns indicates that he was on to something in the first place.
In the opening of , Cummings’ short-fused smalltown cop delivers an increasingly unhinged eulogy at his mother’s funeral, culminating in a bout of anxious, anguished slapstick as he performs an interpretative dance to the eponymous rocker minus the song itself. The lack of “Thunder Road” in was a budget-conscious omission that Cummings smartly managed to make signify as a structuring absence, not only for the prologue—shot, like the short film that inspired it, in a single, excruciating, rubbernecking long take—but for the film as a whole: an alternate title for ’s crisis-of-authority character study could easily be The theme continued in (2019), with the auteur once again starring as a psychologically squiggly embodiment of the thin blue line, this time as a nervy, ex-alcoholic deputy struggling to apprehend a (possibly) supernatural sex killer cutting a swatch through a wintry, -style hamlet. The film’s craft, cutting, and storytelling are at once sharper and more suggestive than its predecessor, with a [2007]); where feinted at the relationship between law enforcement and antisocial tendencies, takes the all-cops-are-sad-bastards theme and runs with it.
