Barber Westchester

Barber Westchester is a movie by filmmaker Jonni Peppers about a boy who lives in a cult, gets a job at NASA and what he finds there means spending the last hour of the movie getting to the meat of the premise "what do you do when 'the story ends?'"

What I mean by that is this movie is very obsessed with conspiracy theories - to a point that there are multiple in this one movie that never really come together. More just stumble and crash away from or into the plot like Chekov's guns that are shown but not fired or ones fired from offscreen but never established (I hope that makes sense). This, in a movie about someone trying to work on themselves, actually works in it's favour for a narrative. It makes you feel like the titular character is a part of a larger world - like how people are when they have to work on themselves. So plot wise, this feels like it's trying to be anything but the standard narrative. It ends happy enough but it's never traditional in it's messaging or tone.

The animation also jumps from style to style - it reminds me of a Newgrounds collab in that it feels like amateurs with a true love of what they're doing making a cohesive whole in theme but not quite style. If you're not used to the modern indie animation scene, I'd ease myself into this one. However it's not the worst culprit.

Honestly, maybe it's because of my own life and the idea of the "narrative of life" but I love that this movie acknowledges the work of self development. It's definitely a strange film but if you let it take you, it's a ride worth going on.