It’s been some time since I’ve reviewed an Ohio-made indie (having a baby and adjusting to a new job will do that). My goal has always been to discover the rare diamonds in the rough and to provide professional film criticism to these smaller-scale movies trying to make some noise. I’ve been doing this for a few years now and I’ll admit I haven’t found that many diamonds, so to speak. My wife has long since stopped watching these movies with me and declared me a masochist for continuing this quest. What can I say, I’m still hopeful to discover what Ohio filmmakers can do when given a platform. One such filmmaker, who has since relocated from Ohio to the City of Angels, is W.M. Weikart. I reviewed his 2019 short film Pure O and we have several mutual friends. He asked me to review his next project, a feature-length movie shot with some Ohio-bred talent in front of and behind the camera, so I’m considering Soul to Squeeze as Ohio-indie-adjacent. It’s a trippy, beguiling experience, and it’s one that will prove befuddling to some but is an experience that gets better with every additional minute.

The story itself is relatively simple. Jacob (Michael Thomas Santos, CSI: Vegas) is a young coed who agrees to be the subject of a mysterious experiment. He lives in a house for days and experiences a series of bizarre auditory and visual hallucinations, picking at his mind, memories, and hidden trauma that he’s been trying to ignore for years. Or are they actually hallucinations after all? Can his mind survive?

These experimental/psychological triptych kinds of movies hinge on a few points of potential viewer engagement. First, the most obvious is simply being interesting and memorable in its weirdness. If you’re going for a crazy sensory experience, it helps if there’s actually something crazy worth watching. This was one of my biggest issues with the 2023 horror indie Skinamarink, a strange nightmare that mostly felt like the same ten boring images jumbled around for 80 very tedious minutes of dashed hopes. There’s only so much formless imagery I can watch without some larger connection, and if your movie is going to live or die based upon your outlandish nightmare imagery, then you better rise to the challenge. Skinamarink did not. Thankfully Soul to Squeeze has a larger agenda that reveals itself over the course of its 80-minute running time. We have a character trying to hide from some trauma he’d rather ignore, so we know this experience will force him to confront those feelings and, hopefully, find some way to process his intense emotions and come out the other side a better person. Or it will drive him completely mad. Either storytelling path offers intrinsic entertainment value. There’s purpose under the imagery so it’s not all abstract nonsense waiting for someone else to project meaning onto the disconnected pieces.

Now, it takes a little long to get going to begin to reveal that trauma and that connectivity. For the first forty minutes, weird things are going down without much in the way of a larger set of rules, which could have benefited the engagement, such as disturbing or confounding visions happening between certain hours of the day, allowing our protagonist time to anxiously dread their arrival. Or there could be an escalation in the intensity of the visions and their duration. There could also be the question over whether the visions are real or not, especially if they’re occurring after he’s forced to eat the provided food in the house. Perhaps he even tries to abstain from eating to then discover they still come like dreadful clockwork. Unraveling past residents of this experiment could also foretell what possible fates, both helpful and harmful, could await. Our protagonist could also try and escape as the visions get more personal and find he cannot escape. The character could be a little more active. Jacob seems very compliant for a wounded character undergoing psychological experimentation, which begs the question why he would continue with this treatment after it begins picking away at the secret he doesn’t want to face. There are other directions that the main character could have gone through while we waited for the larger thematic clarity to come into focus with the visions after 40-minutes of atmospheric noodling.

When you’re going for a more experimental narrative with heavy visual metaphors, it can be tricky to find a balance between arty and pretentious, or, to put it in other words, between David Lynch and student films. This balance is tipped toward the latter early, especially when I think a blue flower comes to life and is… a French woman… spouting platitudes before turning back into a flower. It’s stuff like that which can seem a little daft but without the intention of weird humor. In contrast, there’s a strange but amusing scene where our character comes across a sitting mermaid on display in a museum. She literally eats a pearl necklace from Jacob’s hands and then smiles mischievously as it reappears around her neck, now her own possession. There is a larger metaphorical connection here that’s revealed later, with the necklace having a connection to Jacob’s traumatic past and even the concept of the mermaid too. There’s a phone conversation that we get both sides of that ends up starting as one of the earliest points of confusion and agitation for Jacob and then, by its return, serves as an unexpected vehicle for our protagonist’s emotional growth and reflection. It’s a clever and rather satisfying creative boomerang.

Soul to Squeeze impressively masks its low-budget nature through creative choices and elevated technical craft. Weikart has a natural eye for visual composition and lighting especially, so there’s nary a moment where the movie isn’t at least appealing to the eyes. Having a director who can frame an engaging shot is a godsend when you’re primarily going to be stuck in a single location for 80 minutes. A smart and talented visual artist can really hide the limitations of a low budget well. This is also by far one of the best sounding low-budget indies I’ve heard. The sound mixing is impeccably professional and the score by Sonny Newman (Burn the Witch) is very pleasant and evocative and soothing when it wants to be. Sound design is one of the biggest areas that holds back so many micro-budget film productions, and it’s so refreshing to have a movie not only where sound has been given great attention but also incorporated into the presentation and experiences in meaningful and artistic ways. The visuals can be rather eye-catching, like when Jacob’s TV transforms into a multi-screen monster where eyeballs and a giant mouth take up residence on the various screens, and aided by a slick sound design, it all allows the sensory experience to be even more compelling and accessible. As the film progresses, the bigger picture comes into focus, which means more exposition is thrown at the viewer. Weikart and his team cleverly find ways to present the information through a series of sufficient images and sounds that imply plenty with minimal (some of the sound and picture arrangements can take on a certain true crime dramatic recreation feel). I don’t have a final budget number but it looks better than many indies I’ve seen with considerably higher budgets.

There is one very significant technical choice that I wish had been more essentially incorporated into the story of Soul to Squeeze. As its promotional materials declare, this is the “the first film ever to have a continuously changing aspect ratio throughout the entire film. It begins in a 4:3 aspect ratio and expands out to a 2.35:1 by the end.” For the layman, that means throughout the film the aspect ratio is changing from the old boxy TV standard to a wider and wider widescreen. Now, you could make an argument that this is meant to represent the progression of Jacob’s thinking, that his world is literally expanding, but if that’s the case it feels a little too metaphorical to land as an essential tool for this story to be told at its best. It’s kind of neat but ultimately feels more like a gimmick. Perhaps the nights could have been labeled sequentially, and with each additional night the aspect ratio alters, expanding the horizons. You could even make it a Wizard of Oz motif, with Jacob opening a door and coming out the other end with a different aspect ratio to communicate the transition to a new plane of thinking and reality. Without calling more attention to its changes, and without connecting it more deliberately with the onscreen action, it becomes only a slightly noticeable visual choice over time that may go ignored by most.

By design, Soul to Squeeze is meant to be mystifying and experimental, which will try some people’s patience if they don’t find the ensuing imagery and weirdness to be entertaining. I wish there was more of what I appreciated in the second half to be present in the first half, and I’ll freely admit that I might have missed some of those clues and connective tissue just due to the strange and abstract nature of the movie. I was never bored and often amused at the various ideas that animate the movie (a game show host narrating breakfast is quite surreal and hilarious). The movie looks good, sounds good, and moves along at a fitting pace. The biggest gripe I have with these kinds of movies is whether it will ever add up to anything or is every moment just another in a chain of interchangeable weirdness? With Soul to Squeeze, there is a connection to much of the imagery and hallucinations, so there is a larger design that coalesces. I think there are some specifics that would have potentially aided the overall experience, but adding specificity could deter the immersion and grasping for understanding desired from these kinds of movies. Soul to Squeeze might not be that quintessential diamond in the rough I’m in search of with these Ohio (and Ohio-adjacent) indies, but it’s still a professionally made, creatively engaging, and fairly entertaining curio that can surprise at a moment’s notice.

Nate’s Grade: B