Littermates runs 87 minutes and spends almost none of them explaining itself. Scott Tinkham and Michael Woloson direct from a script by Tinkham and the setup fits on the back of a receipt. A man takes in two victims of a mysterious war and sets about turning them back into people. The younger man and the younger woman have lost nearly everything they ever knew about themselves and what is left of them is mostly instinct.
So he teaches them. He teaches them how to function and how to get through a day and eventually how to look after themselves without him standing there watching. That is a coming of age story in the most literal form the genre has ever taken because these two are genuinely starting from zero and building a personality out of scraps. The catch is where the building stops. Their bodies come back and their basic skills come back but the emotional and intellectual growth stalls out somewhere around thirteen and simply stays there.
The war almost does not matter
The war is a rumor the movie refuses to chase. We learn that it happened and that these two were caught in it and then the film declines to dig any further into who was fighting or why or what the world outside this arrangement currently looks like. There is no map and no history lesson and no scene where somebody finally sits down and lays the conflict out for us. On paper that is the kind of vagueness I complain about constantly.
Here I barely noticed. The movie is not curious about the war because the war was never the point of it and the three people in the house are more than enough to carry 87 minutes. What would explaining the war actually buy you. It would give you a reason for the damage and Littermates is much more interested in what you do with damaged people once they are sitting at your table and asking questions you do not want to answer.
Children taking care of adults
This is the part that works and it is also the part that made me uncomfortable in a way I enjoyed. Two grown adults operating at the emotional level of eighth graders are steadily handed adult responsibility and adult expectations. Anyone who has spent real time around thirteen year olds knows the register immediately. Enormous confidence paired with almost no judgment and feelings that arrive at full volume with no warning whatsoever.
Played completely straight that is a tragedy and a fairly grim one. Littermates plays it as black comedy instead and the result is funny and quietly awful at the same time. Being cared for by someone who cannot fully grasp what care requires is its own specific dread and this movie gets at it without ever reaching for a scare. That is where its horror lives. Not in the war and not in anything that jumps out at you but in dependency and in the moment a person who is not equipped for it becomes responsible for somebody else.
Luna Verdict
Littermates gets a special presentation at Fantastic Fest and I want to set expectations for anyone planning to walk in cold. This is not a fright movie and treating it as one will only get in your way. It is a black comedy about caregiving and arrested development that happens to be wearing a dystopia like a borrowed coat. The laughs are mean and earned and the discomfort underneath them is doing real work.
It is stranger and considerably sharper than that deliberately underexplained premise suggests on first contact. The missing worldbuilding turns out to be a feature rather than a hole. The arrested adolescents turn out to be the entire movie. Four out of five stars.
Littermates receives a special Fantastic Fest presentation on September 20 followed by a conversation with the filmmakers and cast. Alamo Exclusives releases the film theatrically at more than 30 Alamo Drafthouse locations beginning November 6.
