Something in the Dirt Explained Benson and Moorhead

Hey there everyone! Welcome back to Movie Soapbox, the little corner of the internet that only you and I and that guy sleeping in the corner over there know about. This is the place where we find underappreciated indie films and we make sense of them. Today? We are doing a deep dive on Something in the Dirt, a movie so committed to its own layers of unreliability that by the time the credits roll you’re not entirely sure the directors themselves can tell you what was real. We love it here.

Before we get to the trailer, a mandatory detour. You need to have seen Resolution and The Endless before this one, or at minimum know what happens in them, because Benson and Moorhead have been building something across all three films and walking into Something in the Dirt cold is like reading the last chapter of a novel someone keeps rewriting. The universe these two have constructed is loose, referential, deliberately porous, and it rewards the obsessive. Go watch the other two. We’ll be here.

Alright. From this point forward we are neck-deep in spoilers, and if you haven’t seen the film yet and you keep reading anyway, that’s on you. Mike warned you. He’s warning you right now, specifically, with eye contact. Turn back or accept the consequences.

Levi wakes up in a dingy Los Angeles apartment that looks like it cost him three hundred dollars a month and one previous felony to secure. Within the first few minutes of conversation with his new neighbor John, a math teacher who attends what the film cheerfully describes as an apocalyptic evangelical church, we understand two things about Levi: he’s passing through LA on his way out, and he’s the kind of guy who has a complicated relationship with the phrase “background check.” John, for his part, is wound tight in the particular way that men get wound tight when they’ve decided the end of the world is not just inevitable but imminent and privately exciting. Two guys, one dingy apartment, zero reliable narrators. Then a quartz ashtray starts floating.

And here is where a smarter, better-funded, more committee-managed version of this film would have pivoted immediately into genre. Some mid-budget thriller with a recognizable face stapled to the poster would have taken that floating ashtray and turned it into a creature feature, a government conspiracy procedural, something with a third-act set piece that tested well in Burbank. What Benson and Moorhead do instead is decide that the floating ashtray is really a question about whether two deeply untrustworthy men are capable of witnessing anything truthfully, and then they spend ninety minutes not answering it. That choice alone should tell you what kind of filmmakers these are, and what kind of machine they managed to stay outside of long enough to make three of these things.

The movie they build around that floating ashtray is framed as a documentary, or a reenactment of a documentary, or a reenactment of footage that no longer exists because the hard drives allegedly melted, which, if you have ever actually tried to destroy hard drives, you know does not happen from ambient heat in a Los Angeles apartment, it just doesn’t, and the film knows you know that, and it doesn’t care, and that is the entire game. Levi and John decide their lives have been building toward this moment of levitating quartz and dimensional transmissions, so naturally they start filming, start theorizing, start distrusting each other in escalating increments as the documentary exposes things neither of them wanted exposed. Levi is on the neighborhood sex offender registry. John’s church is less “evangelical” and more “we have done the math on Revelation and the math checks out.” Each revelation (no pun intended) chips away at the other’s willingness to stay in the room, and yet they stay, because the phenomenon keeps pulling them back, and because, as Levi admits out loud in the film’s most clarifying moment, one of them might just be manipulating the other into an endless rabbit hole going nowhere, and the other is going along because he wants to believe in something different than his actual life.

That line is the spine of the film. Everything else hangs off it.

The incident reaches its conclusion when John wakes up floating near the ceiling and crashes to the floor in a heap. Levi is gone. The framing cuts to a later interview where John explains, with the specific calm of a man who has rehearsed this, that Levi probably died in the upper atmosphere before falling back to earth. When pressed for specifics, John says his calculations were off. Which ones? Some of them. The film ends on a pan to a set of Matryoshka dolls and the sound of tinkling bells. Fade to black. You are left holding the bag.

Now let’s talk about what this film actually survived to reach you in that form.

Films at this budget tier, and Something in the Dirt was shot during the COVID-19 pandemic almost entirely in a single apartment with Benson and Moorhead themselves playing the leads, live or die on one specific kind of creative freedom: the freedom that comes from nobody else being able to afford to care what you do. There are no second-unit directors here, no line producers negotiating on behalf of a foreign pre-sale that requires a legible ending, no test screenings in Pasadena where a room full of people circled “confusing” on a card and someone took that card seriously. The film’s refusal to resolve, its structural commitment to unreliable reenactment, its willingness to implicate its own directors as possible frauds, all of that survives because the budget was low enough that the machine had no lever to pull. You give this same script to a filmmaker two tax brackets up the food chain, with a distribution deal already in place, and by the fourth draft someone has added a scene that explains what the quartz actually is. Count on it.

Several things in this film are genuinely confusing and worth untangling before we get to the theories, so let’s lay them out clean.

The documentary framing: The film presents itself as a reenactment of footage that was destroyed, meaning everything we see is Levi and John’s reconstruction of events, performed after the fact. This matters enormously because it means there is no footage we can treat as objective. Every scene has been filtered through two men who have already demonstrated they are unreliable, possibly deceptive, and motivated to make their story land a certain way.

The hard drives: The original footage allegedly melted along with the hard drives. This is presented as fact within the film but is, as noted above, physically implausible under normal conditions. The film invites you to notice this without underlining it.

The cactus fruit: If you’ve seen Resolution, the red-seeded fruit growing on Levi’s cactus is not decorative. In the earlier film it is associated with an alien substance tied to the time-loop mechanism, and its appearance here is the single most concrete visual argument that these two men are operating inside the same kind of temporal trap that swallowed the characters in those films. The red drug bag on the floor near Levi’s couch is the same thing at a different stage. Benson and Moorhead do not explain this. They just leave it there for you.

John’s final interview: We never learn who is interviewing John, when this interview takes place, or what John’s actual legal or personal situation is at the time. “My calculations were off. Which ones? Some of them.” This is either the evasion of a man who built a false story and doesn’t want to over-specify it, or the evasion of a man who genuinely doesn’t understand what happened to him. The film refuses to tell you which.

The Matryoshka dolls: Nested dolls, dolls within dolls, structures that contain smaller versions of themselves. If you want to read the ending image as a statement about the recursive, self-containing nature of the Benson/Moorhead universe, and about the possibility that Levi and John are themselves nested inside a story being told by something larger, that reading is available. The film is not going to confirm it for you.

Now the theories. There are five serious ones, and they are not equally valid.

Theory One: Time Penance, Levi and John Are Looping. In both Resolution and The Endless, the unseen force at the center of the Benson/Moorhead universe operates as a kind of cosmic curator that traps morally compromised people in loops until they either get it right or don’t. The evidence for this reading in Something in the Dirt is the cactus fruit, the drug bag, and the general character profiles of both men, a man on a sex offender registry and a man whose church has done the arithmetic on the apocalypse. Both are exactly the kind of fatally flawed protagonist this universe tends to swallow. The problem with this theory is that the film shows us no loop. No repetition. No barrier. Levi appears to die, which in a true loop would be a reset point, not an endpoint, and nothing in the film’s structure suggests we are watching one iteration of a cycle rather than a single failed attempt. The cactus fruit is compelling circumstantial evidence but it is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a theory that the film’s own structure does not directly support.

Theory Two: Pure Conspiracy, Stand-Alone Film, Nothing Is Real. Strip away the Benson/Moorhead universe entirely and read the film on its own terms. Two men, both looking for a break, both not above fabricating one, decide that a random apartment quirk is the center of the universe, build a mythology around it from Reddit-tier pattern-matching and numerological free association, film a reenactment of footage they claim they lost, and present it as a documentary. The film is a portrait of how conspiracy thinking actually works: two people in a room, one manipulating and one wanting to be manipulated, each feeding the other’s need to make a bigger story out of a small and disappointing life. Levi even says this out loud. This theory has no structural flaws. It is the most defensible purely internal reading of the film.

Theory Three: Everything Is Real and Something Actually Happened. The phenomena are genuine. The quartz floated. The transmissions were real. The apartment sits on something genuinely anomalous and Levi and John actually made contact with it, and Levi’s death is the consequence of wielding something neither of them understood. This is the Primer reading, two guys who stumble onto something real and are destroyed by their inability to handle it responsibly. The problem is that the film works very hard to establish these two men as untrustworthy, and the reenactment framing removes any objective evidence. You have to decide to believe them despite everything the movie has shown you about why you shouldn’t. That is a choice available to you. It is not the choice the film is steering you toward.

Theory Four: Benson and Moorhead Are Playing a Game and Nothing Connects. The filmmakers are doing exactly what Levi and John are doing, building an elaborate mythology out of pattern and reference that ultimately means nothing, and the film is a winking confession of that. It’s the auteur-as-huckster reading. It’s possible. But given that Justin Benson has shown up in the wild to engage seriously with fan theories about these films, including leaving comments that suggest the connections run deeper than surface-level easter eggs, this theory reads as the least charitable and probably the least accurate.

Theory Five: The Films Are About the Obligation to Show Up for People. This is the soft theory, the one with no hard evidence and no structural argument, just an accumulated feeling across all three films. Resolution is about a man who chains his friend to a pipe because he refuses to watch him die. The Endless is about two brothers who go back into something terrible together because they can’t leave each other alone in it. Something in the Dirt is about two strangers who become, briefly, the most important person in each other’s life because they are both looking at the same impossible thing at the same moment. The through-line is not time loops or alien forces or numerological convergence. The through-line is: what are you willing to do for someone who needs you to be in the room? And what happens when that impulse leads you somewhere you cannot come back from?

Movie Mike’s pick is Theory Two with Theory Five running underneath it like a current. The literal reading of the film is that these two men built a conspiracy to survive their own lives, and the film is an unflinching and somewhat affectionate portrait of exactly how that kind of self-deception operates between two people who need each other to keep going. But the reason the film is not cruel, the reason it doesn’t feel like mockery, is that underneath the fabrication there is something real: two lonely, compromised men who found each other in a dingy apartment and decided, together, that the world was more interesting than it had any right to be. That decision cost Levi his life, or it cost him the story of his life, depending on how much you trust John’s account of what the upper atmosphere did to him. The film knows you can’t fully separate those two things. That’s why it ends on the nested dolls and walks away.

Benson and Moorhead made this film in a single apartment during a pandemic, directed it themselves, starred in it themselves, and delivered something that seventeen rounds of studio notes would have ironed completely flat. The conspiracy-theorist protagonists, the refusal to confirm or deny the supernatural, the recursive documentary structure, all of it would have been “clarified” into something audience-testable and therefore inert. Instead you get a film that ends with tinkling bells and a question it has no intention of answering. Some films survive the machine. This one survived by never going near it.

Go watch Resolution first. Then The Endless. Then come back to this one. And when the ashtray floats, pay attention to what you want to believe, because the film is watching you decide.