NEX-IS-US: Profoundly Sorrowful Teen Ensemble Drama

Kevyn Tapia’s bold and surprising NEX-IS-US is a 35-minute drama with three interlinked narratives unfolding over the course of a day. It is a remarkably well written film, especially for a young filmmaker, even if it sometimes drops the ball. 

Featuring five teenagers and the adults on their periphery, the non-linear narrative makes the pieces fall subtly into place, emotionally mimicking the experience of realising too late that you are in trouble. That feeling is deeply adolescent in quality, and one of the reasons why the film lands as well as it does with its ambitious attempt. The other, related reason is its creative choices that are teeming with a messy, enthusiastic reach for indie grandeur. Green tinted colour palette, handheld camerawork, wipes (the most surprising of all), actual or almost teenagers, real faces, a score with the right amount of sorrowful restraint. It’s all here. It isn’t always great, especially after the midpoint, but it generally vacillates between endearingly messy and just plain messy. 

The plot goes something like this: Devin (Julian Frometa) is practising driving with Carson (Tapia) in Carson’s car; Tory (Kristina Puzin), using all her energy to remember words during a bad case of stage fright, tanks her audition with a tepid and ultimately abandoned Amy March monologue; Freddie (Ryne Marino) deploys a go-getter attitude in the least useful of ways, manoeuvring Marco (Marvin Tapia) into a friendship. Each of these stories begin at different times of the same fateful day, events reverberating in ways that leave crumbs for you to figure out the ominous path before the film takes you to the destination. 

Each narrative is undergirded by strong writing, and in some cases, great acting. Tory’s comes to mind, in particular. Without giving anything away, Puzin hauntingly combines resignation, vulnerability, and fear as her character begins to piece together the exact dimensions of the danger she is faced with. A volatile conflict between Devin and Carson is the highlight of their storyline; the characters’ choices intuitively make sense, and what a relief to not see an overweight character as also simple. Marino and Marvin Tapia deliver an unsettling episode; throughout, you worry for Marco’s safety, even as you repeatedly find yourself sympathising with Freddie’s ham-fisted efforts to make a friend on a completely lonely birthday. Marino walks a fine line between pitiful and deranged. Franklin C Jackson and Douglas A. Ward make an unlikely pair. Never crossing paths on screen, yet destined to do so, they play a keen tragedy between them as foils of one another with a string of lost children between them. 

More than showing promise, NEX-IS-US is absorbing in and of itself. There is an authenticity and near elegance to its high-stakes drama that only some of the plethora of young adult stories manage to achieve.