Hell is someone else’s pubic hair in your bath. WM Weikart’s feature debut hits us with this and other observations – some grimly funny others just bizarre – in Soul to Squeeze, a psychological moshpit of a drama about a guy on a trip into his own unconscious mind.
There’s a Red Hot Chili Peppers song of the same title, and Weikart borrows its sentiment – “Insanity it seems/Has got me by my soul to squeeze/Well all the love from me/With all the dying trees I scream…” – to tell the story of a disturbed man, Jacob (Michael Thomas Santos), who opts for a revolutionary treatment designed to rid him of his psychiatric woes. All he has to do is enter an empty house on his own and accept whatever happens while he’s there.
In early moments we see Jacob sign a waiver, exculpating the shadowy organisation running the experiment from any responsibility for what’s about to happen – any at all. And then he’s off, on a ride down the rabbit hole into his own psyche. “Make me happy again,” he whispers before the treatment takes over and he’s lost to rational explanation.
What crowds inside our minds, wonder director Weikart and co-writer Andrew Rivas. For a doomscrolling generation, the answer is all manner of visual detritus, the flotsam of daily visual bombardment. Jacob watches a 1950s educational movie about the working of the eye. He turns into a dog. He has a bath where he finds the aforementioned pubic hair, before becoming wolfman-hirsute himself. A ballet dancer arrives from nowhere. TV screens laugh at him. A ball of white light tantalises him.
It is almost but not quite non-linear, non-narrative cinema, though from this flickerbook of stuff a narrative does eventually start to emerge, one which explains why Jacob lost his purchase on life in the first place.
There is no real budget to speak of but Weikart and co achieve miracles using simple stuff like white face make-up, torches and even cardboard boxes at one point, as a tunnel between adjacent realities.
Other things are more technical, like the way Weikart widens the aspect ratio, starting at 4:3 and ending at 2.35:1, to indicate Jacob’s expanding consciousness, or his grasp of the bigger picture. And DP Pierce Cook also plays with the cinematography, starting things off bright and breezy and winding into darker realms as the film progresses.
Which suggests that the treatment is a failure? You have me there. If there is a criticism to make it’s that literalists like me don’t quite have enough to get hold of. Until its closing stretches, it’s as if all the subtext of a normal film had been overgrounded, leaving nothing behind to excavate. For the vast bulk of the film what you see is what you get, which is an irony considering the subject matter.
Is it all a bit “doors of perception”, a touch Timothy Leary and his “turn on, tune in, drop out” mantra? Probably, if those phrases mean anything to you.
Good job there is actor Santos on hand holding it all together. He does an excellent job, resisting the urge to overdo the mad stuff and providing a solid human core as a counterweight to all the weird goings-on. For all its incomprehensibility at times, thanks to Santos there is someone we want to make it through. Jacob’s humanity is the film’s throughline.
Weikart has been here before. In a series of shorts including Insidious Whispers, Pure O and Daniel Johnston’s Yellow, he’s taken a lo-fi look at people on the edge. He’s currently working on his next project, titled Verses in Misfit Hearts, which – from a “proof of concept” sequence you can find online – looks like being another excursion into similar territory. I’m looking forward to seeing where he goes with it. Someone, give him some money!
Soul to Squeeze – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
