After Last Season is a horror film that doesn’t function like any other horror film because it doesn’t function like any other film, period. Our unconscious mind is helpless before this false reality.

Are there any cinematic mysteries left to be solved? In this day and age, there are precious few secrets left in our collective cultural artifacts. Every curiosity is pored over and examined by armchair sleuths the world over. The infinite wonders of cinematic art are reduced to trivia. The ocean of data is ever expanding and there is nowhere left to hide. But Mark Region’s After Last Season is one of the 21st century’s greatest enigmas, an all-time unsolvable artistic puzzle. At this point, this stultifying transmission is effectively a cold case. Much of the evidence has disappeared in the intervening years behind disinterest, resignation, and 404 errors.

The void at the center of After Last Season is its creator, writer/director Mark Region. Who he is and why he made this disconcerting film have been the subjects of much debate and speculation. In an infamous interview given to Filmmaker Magazine before the theatrical release — the only interview that Region has ever given — he stated his intentions plainly while fueling years of confusion: “After you’ve seen it, you know the whole plot,” he claimed. “It’s all in there. It’s very logical. I wanted to make the movie as realistic and logical as possible.” But after After Last Season was four-walled into theaters, and subsequently released in a limited DVD run — Criterion also “leaked” a forthcoming 4K restoration, a prank that has been mostly scrubbed from the timeline — Region vanished and the movie became a befuddling myth.

After Last Season dwells in the subconscious of the internet and cycles through upticks in interest. It is either a deeply committed Dadaist miracle or the most confounding of all paracinema trash films. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky brilliantly christened it “The Last Year at Marienbad of Z-grade bad movies.” Whether or not it is a work of mad genius — likely not, but who’s to say — it has a transcendent power to lodge itself permanently in your cerebral cortex. It’s a sort-of lifeless metaphysical drama following two neurology post-grads, Matthew Andrews (Jason Kulas) and Sarah Austin (Peggy McClellan), who are involved in cutting-edge research at the Prorolis Corporation. In the course of their studies, they find themselves in the middle of a techno-thriller plot that doubles as a meta-surrealist parody of narrative formula.

The centerpiece of the film involves Matthew and Sarah undergoing a lengthy “psychology experiment” where Matthew attempts to visualize Sarah’s thoughts, depicted through janky animated scenes, using microchips (see: Post-its) placed on each of their temples. They soon discover that Sarah is inexplicably communing with the victims of a local serial killer who’s on a spree. She is having hazy visions of people right before they are murdered. But large portions of this may be Matthew’s dream? Or perhaps this entire film is in the mind of the man getting an MRI scan in the opening scene? Or perhaps this whole boxy artificial reality is the product of a failing mind outside the bounds of the narrative? In any event, before they can use this telepathic ability to stop the murderer, the killer finds them. But the spirit of one of his victims, Craig, shows up simultaneously to intervene. The killer is knocked unconscious then apprehended. And all of this has something to do with grief, brain trauma, and schizophrenia — but what exactly is unknowable.

When the trailer appeared in 2009, some, including Entertainment Weekly, openly wondered if the clearly made-up name Mark Region was a pseudonym for Spike Jonze, and if After Last Season was an elaborate prank to promote Where the Wild Things Are. That theory was abandoned once it became clear that this was in fact a full-length project slated to hit theaters that June. It played for one week in four Cinemark theaters (in Lancaster, California; North Aurora, Illinois; Rochester, New York; and Austin, Texas). After its ignominious theatrical run, the film’s distributor called each location and told them to burn the prints.

Region’s real name is actually Sean Chheang Chhun, a treasurer and real estate business manager for several companies in Tewkesbury, Massachusetts — back around 2009 at least, as revealed by Alternate Takes discussion board obsessives not long after the film’s release. But even this seemingly crucial piece of the puzzle has mostly been lost to time and comes up infrequently in the trickle of writing about After Last Season. Region’s identity was discovered through detailed research into tax records and Massachusetts business holdings, particularly looking into the independent production studios Index Square and Sphereplane, credited for both Medium Waves — an equally cryptic and impossible to find murder-mystery precursor short from 2006 — and After Last Season.

Even still, Sean Chhun has little to no online footprint. Next to nothing is known about him and these films are the only traces of his artistic vision and worldview. No one with any attachment to either After Last Season or Medium Waves has spoken to him since the movies came out. And Region/Chhun, presumably, under the aegis of the legal team representing Index Square, has gone to some lengths to bury his small body of work. Mubi still displays a headshot for Mark Region that is clearly not him.

Region seemed to want to defuse some of the fuss around the bizarro trailer in 2009 but in his lone interview he can’t keep his story straight. He is cagey about the number of people on set, the film’s budget — estimated at $5 million — and especially the animation sequences, which were not produced by an animation studio or VFX house, but by “people who knew things to do things [sic] on computer. Unknown people.” Whoever they were, the inclusion of animation resulted in the influx of cash. There also seem to be an inordinate number of people credited in the making of After Last Season; many of these people likely do not exist. Everything from the negative cutting to the sound quality to the film stock is suspect. Some allege, based purely on circumstantial evidence, that Region was involved in a money laundering scheme, giving After Last Season an illicit after-taste. It all means that the exact shape and makeup of the movie you’re watching is undefined and constantly in flux.

With all this uncertainty, After Last Season’s effect is like The Blair Witch Project if it was never revealed as fictional. If you squint, you can see the conceptual framework of, say, Dogville but without any theatrical heft. You could trick yourself into seeing Apichatpong Weerasethakul in the off-kilter emptiness. It recalls Hal Hartley’s ersatz playfulness but without a sense of humor (come to think of it, Jason Kulas does have a bit of a budget Martin Donovan vibe.) Its plot is like The Cell but without any baroque visual imagination, or like The Dead Zone without any pulpy tongue in cheek. After Last Season almost resembles the structuralism of Wavelength but without any formal discipline or avant-garde stature. Its narrative prefigures contemporaries like Beyond the Black Rainbow, but without any of the art-damaged psychedelia, and Inception, without a fraction of its blockbuster appeal. Region claimed that After Last Season was influenced by The Sixth Sense and The Exorcist, so, whatever his intention, horror movies played a factor in the genesis. And, sure, it’s like The Room, but After Last Season doesn’t betray any garden variety hubris. Improbably, what After Last Season most resembles is Mulholland Drive. It’s an accidental uncanny puzzle box that feels like a waking nightmare. After Last Season is a blank canvas on which to project both your cinephilia and your gnarliest anxieties.

There are traces of a conventional horror movie in here, the faint outline of a dream of a slasher flick haunting this movie. After Last Season’s killer wears a mask — well, his face is obscured by a silver surface, like a fencing mask, in the animations — and he uses a butcher knife. Awkwardly intercut handheld POV shots add to the unease but never gain any momentum or truly resolve. There’s also a tragic ghost story shoehorned in the last act, a restless spirit that needs to be freed. Even though After Last Season involves a knife-wielding serial killer and paranormal elements, it’s too inert to be scary; it’s the way that it is told that is so troubling. The film takes apart the language of cinema to an elemental level — beyond, even, to the point of molecular discohesion. It’s full of empty space: long pauses in conversations; beyond minimalist sets; tedious cutaway shots to seemingly meaningless objects; dead-eyed line-readings; and, of course, countless sheets of blank paper.

This is a horror film — and indeed its now-dead official website went out of its way to highlight After Last Season as “a terrifying movie” — that doesn’t function like any other horror film because it doesn’t function like any other film, period. After Last Season’s chief value is as an experience, as something to engage with self-consciously, at a remove, from behind glass. There are details within the mise-en-scène that elide comprehension, with no discernible purpose. The framing is always being corrected as we settle into scenes. The inanimate presence of the unknowable person behind the camera is always felt. Sometimes you can hear noises bleeding in from the set; the actors even react to these intrusions from the real world that simultaneously feel like ruptures from the beyond. Glitchy, almost subliminal vocalizations occasionally pierce the white noise. The room tone is still present, or the sound recording has been run through so many filters that it is hyper-compressed and feels like it’s inside your skull.

There are so many greatest hits to list: the notorious MRI machine made of cardboard, contact paper, and plastic; the primitive screensaver-esque previsualization animations; the twisty plot full of unresolved, elliptical scene fragments; headache-inducing continuity editing; the inscrutable insert shots of empty walls and directional signs; the desperate obsession with spatial orientation; the throwaway gag about the pathetic clock-radio; the distracting Union Jack belt; the newspaper that is just a single 8.5”x11” print out; paperbacks hastily retrofitted into textbooks; the inane, mind-numbing dialogue about hot springs, shopping plazas, library printers, and the weather; the medical jackets and tablecloths still creased from their packaging; oversized overstock costuming; the framed pictures facing the wall; a score that sounds like a broken Casio preset; and, again, the blank sheets of paper — so many blank sheets of paper, a key piece of the grand mystery of After Last Season. The impulse to purposefully tape single sheets of printer paper to the outside of an otherwise nondescript house is something that can’t be explained, and is undeniably unsettling. It’s vanishingly rare to encounter illogic of this caliber in the wild. Our unconscious mind is helpless before this false reality.

After Last Season is not equipped to be a midnight movie, a self-sustaining phenomenon, or a film that people rally around; it’s too off-putting, spectral, and full of negative space. It’s not a fun time; it’s unnerving, like staring into a void. There’s seemingly no self-consciousness at all to this film. The locus of After Last Season’s malfunction is undefined and ultimately unanswerable. Many films are scary or shocking, but very few make you question the nature of your reality. The horror does not come from the narrative, per se, but from the deeply naïve and artless filmmaking — a cocktail that taps into primal, existential unease and suggests a concerning disconnect from reality. It has the hypnotic, numbing quality of the most functional children’s programming. It elicits the same vaguely ridiculous and melancholy sensation of seeing people’s TV screens through their window when driving by at night — anesthetizing entertainment reduced to abstract shapes floating around in space at different vectors.

The industrial warehouse settings and harsh spotlighting have an eerie, malevolent energy about them. The acting has a lobotomized, pod-person level of detachment, not just remote but emotionally agnostic. Shot entirely out of sequence, in the interest of time and money and available film stock, the actors would recite one random line after another, bookended by long pauses, in the freezing cold and in isolation. Region then tried and failed to fit these fragments back together in the editing. Most everything was completed in a single take — hence the flubbed lines and actors literally checking their scripts in the finished product. Because of this, After Last Season feels like it was written by a faulty algorithm, with the generative, frictionless quality of the most busted and disconcerting AI art.

After Last Season is now as available as it’s ever been, with low-res versions hiding in plain sight on YouTube and the Internet Archive. The most elusive specter from the Bad Movie Renaissance continues to haunt the digital age. This longitudinal neurological exercise in cognitive rejection continues apace. You either have to accept it as a mark of supreme incompetence or unparalleled formal abstraction and audience manipulation. It fails in ways that challenge your preconceptions of human error while also touching the sublime. You either have to acknowledge that there are levels of ineptitude that you had not previously considered or that you are an unwitting pawn in a grand, esoteric experiment, and that you will never know or understand your role and the results. The strange geometry of After Last Season forces you to reckon with an irreconcilable paradox.

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