Six Men Licking the Pavement: “Sour Minnows” Premieres at Fantasia

The image that breaks the world open in Sour Minnows is this: two roommates, walking an empty Los Angeles street on an ordinary afternoon, come across six men sensually licking the pavement.

That is it. That is the rupture. No portal, no monster reveal, no ominous score swelling to tell you the rules have changed. Just a tableau so specifically wrong that the man who witnesses it cannot put his reality back together afterward. Harrison Atkins’ second feature has its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival on July 24, screening in competition for the Cheval Noir Award, with an encore on July 29, and on the strength of that opening image alone it has my full attention.

The Yellow Thing Wears People Like Costumes

The setup runs like this. Ricky, played by David Brown of Jury Duty, and his roommate Tepper, played by Chase Williamson, witness the pavement worshippers and unknowingly peek through some veil they did not know was there. Afterward, time begins to stretch. Memories curdle into lies. Ricky’s relationships, including a situationship with fellow cinephile Aura, played by Suzanna Son of Red Rocket, start taking on dimensions that were not there before.

And then there is The Yellow Thing, an entity that wears people like costumes.

That is a phenomenally unsettling piece of construction, and it is the kind of horror premise that works better the less it is explained. The film has been described as a hangout movie with Lynchian stylings, a surrealist stoner noir, and an experimental reworking of the hangout picture, which are three different ways of saying nobody can quite categorize it. Good. The supporting cast includes Julia Jones, Phil Burgers, Ryan Perez, and Carmen Christopher, which suggests the comedy end is being taken as seriously as the dread.

Atkins Has Been Building to This for a Decade

Harrison Atkins is not a new name so much as an under-known one, and his resume is more interesting than his profile.

His debut, Lace Crater, premiered at TIFF in 2015. Joe Swanberg produced it. The premise, in brief, involves a woman having a one-night stand with a ghost and coming away with something she cannot shake, which is either a comedy about a supernatural STD or a serious film about intimacy and contamination, and the correct answer is that it is both at once. Chase Williamson was in that one too, which makes Sour Minnows a reunion.

In the eleven years since, Atkins has been quietly working as an editor on other people’s films, and the credits are notable: Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, one of the most formally adventurous American movies of the last decade, and Emily the Criminal, the tight Aubrey Plaza thriller. That is a serious apprenticeship in both experimental construction and genre efficiency.

He wrote, directed, shot, and edited Sour Minnows himself. Whatever this thing is, it is entirely his.

Los Angeles Is the Third Roommate

Atkins has said that he grew up inside movies, and that in Los Angeles that sensation reads less like a metaphor than a diagnosis. That line is doing a lot of work, and it explains why the setting matters here.

We have covered this exact terrain before, in Sour Party, another LA absurdist comedy that treats the city as a sun-bleached purgatory where everyone is either a failed artist or a successful scammer, and where failure itself becomes a kind of performance art. Sour Minnows appears to be working the same street from a stranger angle. Its characters are disaffected cinephiles, people who have processed so much film that reality has started to feel like a print with the reels out of order, and the city around them obliges by behaving like a movie that has begun improvising.

Roommates become strangers. Friends drift into parallel realities. In a town where everyone is performing a version of themselves for an audience that may not exist, an entity that wears people like costumes is barely a metaphor at all.

The Dread Is Extremely 2026

Underneath the absurdism, the film is reaching for something specific and contemporary. Its nightmare is furnished with the texture of right now: job listings written by machines, news generated by algorithms, attention spans worn down to nothing, and the peculiar isolation of being constantly connected to everybody and reachable by no one.

That is a hard feeling to dramatize without becoming a lecture, and comedy is probably the only tool that works on it. A film that can make you laugh at pavement licking and then quietly hand you the existential bill is attempting something genuinely difficult.

An Unsold Film Walking Into the Right Room

Worth noting for anyone tracking the indie market: Sour Minnows arrives at Fantasia without a distributor. Worldwide rights are available, with Gersh handling sales, which means this premiere is both a debut and a pitch.

That is not a knock. It is the ordinary reality for a genuinely uncategorizable film, and Fantasia is close to the ideal room for it. The festival’s thirtieth edition has assembled a Cheval Noir competition specifically built to reward work that does not fit anywhere else, judged by a jury that includes people who have spent careers on exactly this kind of cinema. A movie about the theater as a haunted space, premiering to the most devoted genre audience on the continent, is about as favorable a launch as an independent film can engineer.

Where and When

Sour Minnows premieres Friday, July 24 at 6:45 PM at Cinéma du Musée, with an encore screening Wednesday, July 29 at 1:45 PM at Salle J.A. De Sève.

Atkins has described the film as a living thing that watches back. For anyone who has ever sat alone in a dark theater and felt the room notice, that is either a warning or an invitation. I suspect it is meant as both.