‘The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick’ Review: A DIY Wellness Satire Steeped in Thuddingly Obvious Metaphors

Wellness culture takes sinister form in “The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick,” a horror-adjacent domestic drama that can’t quite sustain its tongue-in-cheek delights. Directed by Pete Ohs (“Jethica”), and co-written by Ohs and his four lead actors, the ultra-indie SXSW discovery’s wry tone is accompanied by strange characters and even stranger sound design, and yields a wildly enjoyable initial half. However, like its grieving lead character lost in her millennial malaise, it loses itself down a rabbit hole of metaphors. 

After Yvonne (Zoë Chao) experiences a personal tragedy — the surprising details of which are hinted at over a phone call, before gradually coming to light — she drives to the isolated, woodland home of her old college friend Camille (Callie Hernandez), only to discover a pair of surprise guests when she expected time alone. Camille’s real estate agent Isaac (Jeremy O. Harris) and his partner A.J. (James Cusati-Moyer) are, for reasons inexplicable to Yvonne, staying with Camille for an extended period too, leading to a number of well-meaning intrusions and architectural curiosities, like holes in the floor that allow characters to peer in on each other’s conversations.

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The couple’s upbeat impositions are usually accompanied by lifestyle advice surrounding food, though the actors’ fine-tuned performances ensure a careful tightrope walk between welcoming and duplicitous. There’s something over-eager behind their smiles that occasionally cracks — something Yvonne doesn’t have the wherewithal to unpack and something Camille either doesn’t see or simply won’t.

While dealing with Camille’s ill-timed reminiscing and with A.J. and Isaac’s fragile mood swings, Yvonne’s getaway takes an unexpectedly transformative turn when she’s bitten by a tick and begins experiencing fevers and alternating bouts of fatigue and hunger. From there on out, the film takes a couple of major swings in the realm of its timeline — a strange temporal unfurling — as well as the seeming motives behind A.J. and Isaac’s arrival, and Camille’s readiness to host them alongside a friend who clearly needs some alone time.

The ensuing fairy tale-like imagery is at once obvious in its subtext around outdated gender traditions and biological function — with an admittedly cheeky modern update about how well-to-do, gentrifying queer couples might fit into this dynamic — and yet opaque in its eventual point. Its fears of conservative norms live on the surface, but no matter how twisted a form these take, their impact seldom escalates accordingly. It remains, for the most part, observational.

Where it most succeeds, however, is in its cartoonish foley design whenever Yvonne is presented with either a bowl of homeopathic gruel or delicious culinary treats, as deafeningly loud chewing and slurping envelope the soundscape (these audio clips are mixed into nearly every track, and may as well be the movie’s score and voiceover). Yvonne’s either disgusted by what she’s being fed or she becomes the object of the camera’s disgust while chowing down, a transition Chao sells in amusing ways.

This visceral vulnerability, as a result of Yvonne’s mourning, is the film’s most intriguing facet, which Ohs unveils with a deft hand through his eerie sense of atmosphere. There’s a fun nebulousness to the “where” of it all, too. Camille’s accent seems to be from New Zealand, and while the other characters all sound North American, there’s no real telling where in the world this suburb is located, as though it exists out of time and place. However, the sum total of these aforementioned strengths is a successful tone, which rarely finds itself translated in the form of a successfully alluring plot, let alone one buoyed by impactful themes. It’s coherent, certainly, but the same way an academic paper is coherent, while also being rather dry. When Yvonne begins hearing things, seeing things and suspecting Camille of having ulterior motives, little comes of this paranoia (narratively or aesthetically), resulting in the film plateauing, in lieu of her being able to express her uncertainties.

As it enters its final act, its reveals as to what’s really going on (and why) are seldom presented with the requisite heft to bring it home either as straight drama or social satire. It plays more like an improv project that tiptoes around the nominal realm of “weird” without becoming more polished or leaning full-tilt into its oddities. The pieces of its plot are often left floating in mid-air until their function clicks into place, via either explanation or overt symbolism.

The film’s underlying metaphors are sure to be interpreted and understood, but they’re unlikely to be felt. For all its lingering anxieties, whether through mysterious close-ups of its actors treading uncanny territory or via its lengthy, absorbing, occasionally dizzying shots of wilderness (courtesy of Ohs’ own cinematography), “The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick” ultimately falls prey to its own conceit. It swaps its inherent silliness for a somberness around its withheld lead and lofty grandeur that it, ironically, can’t emotionally convey.