Crocodile Dose (2026)

Earlier this year, I found Kane Parsons’ Backrooms to be a young, successful person’s hollow imagining of the soul-gnawing prison of flesh and time that is middle age. Jason Waters’ Crocodile Dose pitches that wandering, looping, glitched out reality to people his own age and ends up with something far more honest, at times bracingly so. It’s a little bit Clerks and a little bit Superbad, but unlike those movies it isn’t being written by someone with back pain nostalgia for wasted afternoons or all-night ragers, hitting much closer to the bone.

I fucking loved it. A crazed assemblage of shots, feeds, feelings, and substances, Crocodile Dose has the soul of a Hold Steady song and the attention span of Italian brainrot, its characters running nowhere at an absolutely breakneck pace. It feels fucking dorky to refer to films as “Lynchian,” but Waters is really going for it in his use of handheld digital video and his ability to transmute the mundane camera tricks and editing techniques of modern meaningless culture (YouTube clip compilations, TikTok) into something purposeful and artistic. A lot of the shots here have a similar timeless quality to them, too, both in the sense that they feel like they come from a future where the language and tools of cinema have been completely liberated while belonging to a fresh and unreckoned with past.

Every new character introduced to the plot immediately becomes a favorite, though whether their purpose is to help Curtis (Chase Mackay) escape the grim specter of life without his girlfriend or ruin him entirely is uncertain. It’s wickedly funny and horrifyingly cringe, and in both modes Crocodile Dose is imbued with an anxious dread, like even though this definitely isn’t the last or most important night in the lives of Curtis and his friends, it fucking could be. As audacious as any film I’ve seen this year, and absolutely one of its best.