Big Apple Film Festival Review: Dorie Barton’s WELCOME TO THE SHOW takes you on an journey defined by your own imagination

“People wanna watch shit that makes sense, not experimental crap; you know, something that goes somewhere?” As uttered by Rich (Richard Follin), a college senior who resembles a young hippie stoner Robert Pattinson, that’s a line that throws down the gauntlet, practically daring critics to weaponize it, in Dorie Barton’s Welcome to the Show which just screened at the Big Apple Film Festival (and, in fact, won the Best Feature Film Award, as well) and will soon be screening at the Big Bear Film Summit in a couple weeks. We’re not here to do that, because it’s also a misdirection. While this is a movie very much about “experimental crap,” it is very much in the service of going somewhere, both mentally and, in its narrative about characters basically trying to walk home, literally.

All four leads are first-time feature actors, and their characters use their real names: Follin, Keegan Garant, Dillon Douglasson, and Christopher Martin. And just like in other movies that use a similar device – the original two Blair Witch movies, for example – there’s a meta reason for it. One you’ll probably figure out once the premise become clear.

Not to imply that every college experience is universal, but for a lot of us, at least of a certain age, college involved numerous nights and days of sitting around in a room with inadequate furniture, consuming intoxicants, and having what seemed at the time to be deep philosophical conversations. Our first attempts to reckon with Schrodinger’s Cat, for example, or whether trees falling in the forest make a noise if nobody’s around to hear. And of course, the classic stoner question, “What if what I call blue is something you actually see as what I call red?” It’s the dawn of existential articulation for so many.

Now imagine that instead of having those conversations inside a dorm room, you find yourself inside a world made entirely of such questions. That’s what this movie calls The Show, initially presented as an experimental theater piece but soon proving to be far more encompassing than that, like some adult conceptual version of The Phantom Tollbooth crossed with extreme haunts like McKamey Manor or Blackout. Audience members are frisked for weapons, individually given sets of rules they must not break, and then lured by all sorts of attractive women into a car that drops them off, blindfolded, in an unfamiliar part of town. Their journey back to what’s familiar, full of unexpected encounters, is their own personal show.

That’s a whole lot of walking and endurance for a theater experience, though the foursome appears determined to make it worse by taking any and all available drugs, and thereby becoming needlessly combative and excessively paranoid. It’s their last Thanksgiving as college students, and all have agreed not to go home, for once, so they can stay on campus and party. The Show, of course, upends all that, making them want nothing more than to go home and have the effects of their inebriants wear off.

Rich and Keegan represent the opposite poles of reaction to the situation. Rich quickly gets that all of reality as they know it is fair game, and rolls with the concept, while Keegan, after exiting the first scenario having done all the drugs he could, gets screechy and annoying, resisting the experience without offering much else in return. Dillon and Chris are both somewhere in between – sometimes malleable, sometimes impatient. Eventually, the situation will break down their B.S., just as the end of college puts paid to all those B.S. sessions you once had. Unless you never actually left that dorm room…whoah! Maybe The Show never ends…

Part of this is metaphor for the post-college life – for some, it can take a while to realize just when the world of academia ends and the “real” world begins. But it’s also about denial generally. So often in life, we can only get to the truth by engaging facades. Welcome to the Show suggests that while the ultimate truth may remain unknowable, new experiences will get you closer. And life, like improvisational theater, works best when you drop your baggage and say “Yes, and…” to the information.

If there’s a downer here, it’s the song score, mostly also by Douglasson, which mainly consists of the kind of low-key, flat, alt-troubadour stuff I would skip over on college radio stations (it feels like it was simply available cheap or free, rather than necessarily matching the action). But what is effective about it is that you pointedly notice when it stops, usually signifying a major scene change. The snatches of actual score set the mood more effectively.

Overall, writer-director Barton (Girl Flu), who also appears to play the director of The Show within the movie, uses her BFA in theater to effectively create an immersive, experimental play on the screen. And she proves that in a movie, as in a live performance, the real best special effects are actors who sell what they’re saying. Most of her locations are just the emptiest parts of town, but like a bare stage – indeed, a bare stage ultimately is one of the settings along the way — they can become whatever the cast believes them to be.