No one plays dysfunctional men in personal and professional crisis like Jim Cummings, as once again evidenced by The Beta Test, a hilarious, suspenseful, and altogether original satiric thriller about the empty phoniness of the film industry. Talent agents take a vicious beating in this genre hybrid, and so too do a few other Hollywood denizens thanks to their decision to accept a mysterious offer that arrives in their mailbox with no warning and even fewer clues about its origins. Co-written and co-directed with PJ McCabe, Cummings’ latest is a puzzle-box skewering of a foul culture and the men responsible for it, with the actor-director-star choosing to embody the very brand of toxic masculinity that gave birth to the Harvey Weinsteins of the world.
Unlike his prior Thunder Road and The Wolf of Snow Hollow (as well as David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills), all of which featured him as a police officer, The Beta Test (Nov. 5, in select theaters and on VOD) has Cummings assume the role of Jordan, a medium shot at the fictional APE agency. As he stalks through his office, a colleague explains to a boardroom of employees the concept of package deals, and the underlying joke is that the packages which Jordan and his ilk really care about are their own. Jordan is engaged to sweet Caroline (Virginia Newcomb), who’s handling the bulk of their wedding planning since Jordan is fixated on his career. He’s also, in every respect, a sycophantic glad-hander who flashes cheery smiles, talks a big game, and soldiers onward with his positive, proactive schtick even in the face of indignities, such as a would-be client (Wilky Lau) publicly grabbing his crotch—perhaps the biggest humiliation a faux-alpha such as Jordan could suffer.
No matter how many whitening strips Jordan uses, his teeth remain rotten, and The Beta Test swiftly introduces a scenario designed to expose his essential corruptness. Out of the blue, Jordan receives a purple envelope that contains an invitation to a no-strings-attached sexual encounter at The Royal Hotel. Wary of this proposition, Jordan instinctively tosses it in the trash. However, whether out to dinner with Caroline and his co-worker PJ (McCabe), or at the gym, Jordan can’t regulate his horndog thoughts. Thus, he quickly winds up in his apartment building’s dumpster looking for the invite, and then filling out the RSVP card, which asks him about his preferred carnal proclivities. When another envelope arrives with a hotel room key, Jordan follows through on this beguiling insanity and visits The Royal Hotel, where he finds a blindfold on the room’s doorknob and, inside, a similarly masked woman (Olivia Grace Applegate) with whom he has uninhibited sex.
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There are hints of David Fincher’s The Game in this set-up, although Cummings and McCabe establish a more overt horror-ish mood, courtesy of a prologue sequence in which a Swedish woman (Malin Barr) calls 911, sits down with her menacing husband (Kevin Changaris) to declare that she’s leaving him—thanks to her own purple envelope experience—and suffers a grisly fate for her honesty. The abruptness with which this violence plays out is gasp-inducing, and it’s not the last time the filmmakers generate potent tension. Cummings and McCabe repeatedly employ rapid-fire crosscutting montages to both succinctly convey volumes of information, and to ratchet up the anxious atmosphere. The latter is additionally energized by Cummings’ Jordan, a manic creep who becomes crazily consumed with his hotel tryst, causing him to hear things that aren’t said (leading to a cringeworthy outburst directed at his assistant), abandon his five-year sobriety, and start vaping whenever and wherever possible.
Jordan could be the monstrous unseen male boss from Kitty Green’s The Assistant, and Cummings doesn’t hold back in demonstrating his head-to-toe awfulness. As with his Thunder Road and The Wolf of Snow Hollow protagonists, Jordan feigns outward composure but is a roiling mess of a man-child, prone to sudden fits of rage, sorrow, self-loathing and egotistical confidence-boosting bullshit. He’s the epitome of smarmy, boot-licking, jargon-spouting Hollywood greed and affectation, obsessed only with achieving fame and fortune—or, in the absence of those things, pretending to be a big dog in order to impress those around him. Jordan is thoroughly reprehensible, and yet perhaps the greatest pleasure of The Beta Test is that Cummings never makes him so unlikable that he knocks one out of the film. Rather, Jordan’s increasingly desperate attempts to get to the bottom of this weird situation, and to locate the woman with whom he shared that night, is at once pathetic and, on a basic narrative level, intensely intriguing.
The Beta Test’s surprises are numerous, and eventually expand the film’s satiric scope to include not only the movie business but the internet at large. The potential exploitation of both social media data and our most deviant and selfish fantasies eventually factors into the action, as Jordan spirals out of control and the facades that he’s erected and maintained for his entire life come crumbling down. Recurring wide shots that slowly zoom into close-ups help underscore the narcissism at the heart of Cummings and McCabe’s tale, which ultimately has Jordan taking extreme—and often extremely funny—measures to find the answers he’s looking for and, in doing so, to prop up his wobbly sense of self-worth.
In its opening moments, Changaris’ husband sums up the proceedings’ attitude when he slams spotlight-seekers (“Everybody just wants to be famous. And for what?”) and champions inner contentment (“Be happy with what you’ve got”). Covetousness, alas, rules this showbiz universe, alongside unchecked ambition and a grass-is-always-greener mentality that begets misery and insincerity. “It must be absolutely exhausting pretending to be you,” says Caroline to her unhinged beau, but The Beta Test is far from trying, slicing and dicing its chosen milieu with humorous precision. A #MeToo-flavored reckoning that never pulls its punches or resorts to sermonizing, Cummings and McCabe’s film amusingly exposes and embarrasses its main character. More brutal still, it then forces him to face his own failings until all he can do is wanly admit, “Deep down, I am just somebody who cannot give a shit.”
