Two friends come across people acting strangely while walking home in LA. Soon, one of the, Ricky, starts noticing things are not as they should be.
Written and directed by Harrison Atkins, Sour Minnows goes for weird, but in a way that is quietly weird at first and then grows and grows. One could say the characters are weird from the start, which they are, but they also are in a situation that grows in weirdness, which is what the whole film is really about here. The oddity that is the human experience. The writing here will work for some and absolutely not for others. For this viewer, it’s somewhere in the middle, something that may be more on the rare side for viewer experiences here. The characters are people that may not connect for all, something that hurts the story at times and hurts the film in turn. Of course, some of the development for these characters is done in a “wouldn’t want to know them” way, in a way that makes them exactly that guy. In that way, the writing, and direction to go with it, works great, these are not people this viewer could see herself having a single conversation with that was not just on the surface and to be polite, which shows that film writing and direction do accomplish something here.
Helping with the characters and the story here is the cast. This cast is not particularly large here with the main characters doing the bulk of the work on screen. This leads to three performances that stand out after watching the film, those of David Brown as lead Ricky, Suzanna Son as Aura, his potential love interest, and Chase Williamson as Tepper, Ricky’s friend/roommate. The rest of the cast has yet to be listed online, but that doesn’t mean they do not matter. Everyone here does good work with their parts, with Brown and Son being the standouts of the bunch. The way each performance feels a bit off, like that person you once met and didn’t want to deal with, like that family member who is obsessed with their creative endeavor, like those who focus too much on one thing and never really expand. This leads to a discomfort in watching them evolve on screen which a perfect for this film.
Now, the cinematography… This film is presented in what the old school full screen that VHS (and even Betamax) film used to sport, that format made to fit the screen of television back in the day, the format that used to cut off the image on each side and only really giving us a partial view on the planning, filming, editing, and all that done by the filmmakers. It used to be a pita, now, in the days where it is no longer needed, it’s a stylistic choice and one that is rarely successful at that. While other films have made this work to their advantage by setting their stories within a time period where this would make sense, the use of cellphones at the start of the film tells us that this set in recent times, in post need for full frame times, which put this stylistic choice in the more artsy for artsy’s sake than anything else. Being that most folks will watch this on screens optimized for wide screen (or letterboxed) formats, this just doesn’t work all that well; it sort of detracts from the story at times. The quality of the images presented the way things are films (beyond the aspect ratio) is also looking like it was meant to be reminiscent of the “olden days”, but it only adds up to something that doesn’t fully make sense or works here.
Overall, Sour Minnows isn’t a bad watch, but it’s a film that needs to be watched in the right frame of mind, in the right mood, and with the right people for its story. It’s not meant for general audiences and it makes no qualms about it.
Fantasia 2026 runs from July 16th to August 2nd, 2026