Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Little Death (2024)
Weird California strikes again in "Little Death," Los Angeles being the natural home of stories about scriptwriters strung out on drugs while cracking up, or of young adults on a night-time quest to find both stolen property and in a very real sense themselves. Director-cowriter Jack Begert finds house room for both those stories in one film, through the direct method of telling the first of them up to the halfway point and then following a dangling thread straight into the other. A TV series might do something similar for an episode; and Quentin Tarantino knits his characters together all the time with the kind of crime connection that happens here. But Mr. Begert does it bluntly, a suture. And he does it after a particular swerve in story number one that feels like he's improvising, riffing on themes that might cohere into something or might not.