Metacritic reviews

The setup and storyline are absurd, but the angst underneath is as earnest as a campfire confession.

There's an unkillable something at the heart of Septien, an artistic ambition that's not calculated or cynical, that feels homegrown American but is thoroughly resistant to totalitarian spectacle and the manufactured tides of mass opinion. There's no substitute for that.

A microscopic piece of shoestring weirdness-slash-hipster regionalism that the actor Robert Longstreet delivers into some odder, funkier, altogether mysterious place. I don't know what he's doing or what he's going for. But unlike the rest of the movie, his bizarreness seems authentic rather than forced or put on.

As intriguing as the movie is, there's the sense that its free-associative story line has been dredged up from its maker's unconscious and recounted without filter or shape.

A traditional southern gothic, Septien delivers oddities from the perverse to the parochial with a straight face, and in the process restores the oddball genre to what might be called authenticity.

Like many films early in a director's career, it plays more as a sketchbook of intended future endeavors than as a cohesive and fully realized vision in its own right.

Weakly spoofing, or at least deliberately tweaking, Southern Gothic conventions, writer-director Tully can't fully get his arms around this messy genre mashup.

Duly offbeat without ever being very compelling in content or aesthetic.

Never the same movie for five minutes straight, Septien can't sit still.

A lackadaisical dive into backwoods barminess and masculine neuroses, this low-budget paean to indoor plumbing and rampant facial hair doesn't unfold so much as unravel.