Chained for Life

[A] wonky, charming satire...

A sharp movie about moviemaking, with welcome surreal touches that are best left unspoiled.

This low-budget film written and directed by Aaron Schimberg is almost every kind of strange, and yet it has an amiable warmth and an inexhaustible reserve of originality that make it compelling as hell.

Anchored by Weixler's and Pearson's natural charm, "Chained for Life" stands up as both a quiet ode to the experimental, dreamlike spirit of moviemaking and a seriocomic corrective to sentimentalized sideshow portrayals.

If the point of Tod Browning's Freaks was that it's what's inside that makes someone a monster, Chained for Life finds that everyone is awkward, everyone sees their own flaws, and everybody is just somebody.

Chained for Life's genius is in its playfulness, and in [director Aarpm] Schimberg's vision, lucid but disorienting, insistent that there be no boundary between the movie we're watching and the movie - movies? - his characters are making.

Eccentric but not too-determinedly-so quasi-comedy in the movie-about-making-a-movie subgenre. Schimberg doesn’t try to disguise his reference points...

It's less like a dream than it is a trippy sniff off the fumes of a failed suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning - that's a compliment, by the way!

The film works as both an affectionate movie-industry comedy (with references to Franju and 'Freaks') and as a provocative inquiry into the parameters of onscreen 'representation.'

Chained is more than a bit of a scathing indictment of Hollywood portrayals of anyone with a disability or who doesn't conform to traditional matinee idol looks...and cinematic mindfuckery to boot.