Joseph Kahn’s batty sci-fi horror comedy Ick finds the cult favourite filmmaker and legendary music video director on familiar, combative territory, but with mixed results this time out. The director behind hyper-stylized, convention bending genre exercises like Torque, Bodied, and (his masterwork) Detention is once again taking aim at the vapidity of American consumer culture, misplaced outrage, and overused tropes, but unlike his previously (and sometimes purposefully) scattershot efforts, Ick frequently buckles under the weight of its own ambition and vision. It doesn’t flow so much as it jerks the viewer around, before eventually settling into a more conventional horror movie groove towards the end that’s less satisfying than what came before it. There are plenty of good moments in Ick, but as a whole, it’s Kahn’s least satisfying movie.
Hank Wallace (a charmingly sad-sack Brandon Routh) has had plenty of ups and downs in his life. In the early 2000s when he was in high school, Hank was the star quarterback for Eastbrook High, in love with the cheerleader prom queen (Mena Suvari), and in line for a major college athletic scholarship. But his hard partying ways and a career ending injury sent Hank into a drunken spiral. Over the course of several years, Hank was able to get sober, rebuild his life, and eventually get his degree, becoming a science teacher at his former high school.
As a local, Hank has taken notice of a mysterious plant presence known only as “the ick.” It seems to be growing everywhere, and it’s invasive as hell, but most of the town’s residents don’t want to pay it any mind. It’s everywhere, but it’s not like this out of control growth is hurting anything, right? The only person who seemingly gives a shit is high schooler Grace (Maline Pauli Weissman), the daughter of Hank’s high school love and possibly his child. Hanks starts taking more of a notice in the ick, as well, and it’s not long before these goopy roots start enveloping the whole of Eastbrook and possessing all the town’s residents to do its bidding.
Pitched somewhere between a riff on The Blob and The Faculty – two of the best horror movies driven by young people in small towns ever made – Ick writers Khan, Dan Koontz, and Samuel Laskey provide a solid base for monster movie adjacent hijinks. Ick provides a nice, if somewhat obvious reflection of American protectionism in the post-COVID era, with residents spouting misinformation, calling deaths false flags, and generally acting like unhinged lunatics before they even get possessed by this malevolent plant because they refuse to have their convenience disrupted. The kids are marginally smarter than their adult counterparts, but some of them, especially Grace’s faux-woke boyfriend, Dylan (Harrison Cone), spend too much time trying to appear enlightened instead of being honest with themselves or actually making decisions. Kahn and company pile gags on top of gags, so if one doesn’t hit, another is just around the corner. I also can’t think of too many other filmmakers who are able to lampoon their own work (with some great Torque references) and simultaneously work in nods to the depressing slow cinema of Bela Tarr and french modernism.
Kahn is a smart filmmaker with a sharp wit, keen eye, and boundless energy who’s willing to let the viewer in on the joke. Ick is a dumb popcorn movie at heart, but the brain has (at least) a B.A. As a slick visual stylist, Kahn excels at filming large scale sequences with lots of moving parts, and pumping some life into the kinds of mundane sequences lesser directors would let slide with a lot less panache. Something wild is always happening in a Joseph Kahn film, and Ick is no exception to that rule. As an apocalyptic story of doomed teens and a handful of smarter than average adults trying to survive, Ick fares a lot better than the similarly themed Y2K did around this same time last year. And Kahn’s use of music (this time adopting a playlist of easily recognizable early aughts emo, pop punk, and rock tracks) is some of the best in the business.
A Joseph Kahn film thrives on chaos, but Ick finds the director twisted up in the roots of his own creation. The pacing of Ick is inconsistent, and instead of flowing at breakneck speed or finding a groove, the editing of Kahn’s latest kills a lot of the fun. A lot of scenes don’t blend together well with whatever comes before and after it, and some just abruptly end with a fade before moving onto something totally different. At various points, the inconsistencies in the edit step on punchlines or undermine some of the scarier, more thrilling aspects of the stories. At times Ick feels like like it was directed by someone familiar with music videos and more like a clip show masquerading as a finished film.
Things get progressively worse just as they should be getting better. When the shit really hits the fan in Ick, Kahn spends much longer than advisable on a well performed, but ultimately awkward bit of sincerity, before going headlong into an action heavy climax that abandons a lot of the humour and tries to unsuccessfully go for scares instead. The more Ick tries to do, the less it ultimately pays off.
Like all of Kahn’s films, Ick will prove divisive. Some will praise its reckless disregard for filmmaking convention and wit, while others will call it a headache inducing nuisance. While I tend more towards the former of these two settings, it doesn’t mean that I had a ton of fun watching Ick, especially down the stretch. The charm of the situation and the underlying commentary wears off under the weight of a story that can’t fully decide if it wants to be scary or silly. It’s a near miss, but Kahn’s misses still manage to be more beguiling than a lot of filmmaker’s successes.
Ick is now available to rent or buy on digital in Canada. It will be released on DVD December 23, 2025.
