Adam Pearson and Jess Weixler in The Chain of Life (Kino Lorber)

 Aaron Schimberg’s Chained for Life is the first film in a very long while that incorporated itself into my dreams the night I saw it. The film continued on into my slumber, and my subconscious mind was still swimming with all of its themes (and beautifully, beautifully posited questions). In that way the film hit a nerve about so many perplexing things about the film industry and the act of storytelling. I am hesitant to go to that buzz word du jour, woke, but this film for me felt so awake.

Jess Weixler (Teeth) stars as Mabel, a famous Hollywood actress taking on a starring role in a Dario Argento–esque, avant-garde horror film by an enigmatic German director. The film Herr Director is making is set in a hospital run by a mad surgeon (Steven Plunkett), who seeks to cure people with physical anomalies. The project’s controversial twist is that Herr Director insists on casting all of the patients with nonprofessional actors with real-life physical disfigurements. This includes Mabel’s on-screen love interest, Rosenthal, played by Adam Pearson (Under the Skin), a man with tumors that give him an unusually large, nearly expressionless face.

Most of the movie takes place in-between filming, during the downtime for the actors and crew. The most apparent influence here is the style of Robert Altman, as the camera glides along the set and gives us bits of dialogue in mid-conversation. The dialogue always has something to do with the themes at play, the characters in a meta-textual way suggesting what we might be already thinking or positing questions that we may want to start considering as the next scene revs up. From the very first scene, the focus weaves in and out of the film-within-a-film and the making of that film, at times blurring the lines of reality and letting us figure out what is real and what is not. Schimberg plays this trick on us quite a few times.

Rounding out the cast are Plunkett as a smug George Clooney–type, always playing up his charm, and Sari Lennick as the supporting “past-her-prime” actress. Charlie Korsmo, known for playing Kid in Dick Tracy and who hasn’t been onscreen since 1998’s Can’t Hardly Wait, turns in a splendid performance as Herr Director. The role is essentially a Werner Herzog impression that takes on several funny levels, but I won’t ruin it for you here—it’s still making me giggle just thinking about it. Then there is Pearson, who carries half of the film as our window into the world of the cast playing the patients, who are treated like specialized extras by the rest of the cast. Rosenthal has been chosen solely because of the way he looks, and this brings into question whether his casting is fully exploitative or altruistic.

Writer-director Schimberg himself has a facial disfigurement, a bilateral cleft palate. His first film, Go Down Death, also dealt with physical differences, and, indeed, Schimberg has stated that all his work deals with this subject matter. Chained for Life begins with a quote by film critic Pauline Kael on why only beautiful people are the subjects of film. Then the next hour and a half is like a poetic collage looking at both beauty and the unconventional and how two extremes of appearance can be isolating for an individual burdened by either of them.

What his film poignantly plays with is how we cast people (whether they are beautiful, atypical , or just plain) and how they are then translated on-screen as narrative tools to present ideas that are grandiose and therefore artificial, when instead we all should be striving for something a little more down-to-earth, like treating each other with common decency.