A moment of innocence pops up just before the home stretch of Rats!, writer-directors Carl Fry and Maxwell Nalevansky’s contribution to American dirtbag cinema: a tender, unguarded exchange between Raphael (Luke Wilcox) and Bernadette (Khali Sykes), two 20-somethings stuck to their hometown, Pfresno, Texas, like deck boats grounded on a playa. Both of them desperately wish to get the hell out of their personal Hell, where the writing’s on the graffitied walls, the pockmarked roads, the cell where Raphael idles at the start of the movie: no future exists in Pfresno other than a holding pattern of morbid decay.
So Bernadette low key invites Raphael to ditch Pfresno for her uncle’s Iowan blackberry farm, and Raphael enters a sweet reverie: he and Bernadette, lounging in the back of his cousin Mateo’s (Darius Autry) pickup truck with the open road before them and endless desert embracing them. Raphael’s contentment doesn’t last. They’re actually in Mateo’s backyard, where his obnoxious neighbor Nestor (Marc Livingood) is hosting a party for Pfresno’s degenerate asshole demographic, the people comprising 25% of why Raphael and Bernadette are eager to relocate; the remaining 75% consists of 25% the backwater bizarreness seen only in America’s most neglected burgs, and especially 50% of Officer Williams (Danielle Evon Ploeger), a cop who’s so unhinged, even the good old blue wall won’t stand for her.
Bonkers details like these are embedded in the DNA of Rats!. Totaled up, they’re extensive enough to complicate what’s otherwise a straightforward film about jaded, dissatisfied youth yearning to break away from their societal mooring; apart from Williams and all the degenerates, there are virulent homophobes protesting the violent pink exterior of Mateo’s house, an aspiring newscaster who can’t even say the town’s name right (lady, the “P” is silent), bigoted tittle tattlers, a possible terrorist group seeking components to build nukes, and a serial murderer whose signature move is amputating his victims’ hands (pronounced “hahns” by literally everyone). Pfresno’s citizenry is constitutionally paranoid. They see a van parked on the curb, and they immediately assume it’s the FBI. (They turn out to be right, of course, but still.)
Surprisingly, throughout their rampant absurdist grotesquerie, Fry and Nalevansky unpack a few fundamental truths about the experience of living in the United States, at any time and particularly ours. America: ‘tis a silly place. People chase fame, their next high, juicy gossip with zero consideration for the people they’re gossiping about, tough guy (or gal, in Williams’ case) status, and their neighbors’ possessions, though people like Nestor aren’t keeping up with the Joneses. They’re merely jonesing. Rats! frames America as a rodent colony sans social behavior. Practically no one in the film has any care for, or gives a flying fuck about, their fellow man, excepting Raphael, Bernadette, and Mateo, each of them apparently resistant to the sludge of daily existence in Pfresno. (Fair’s fair: Panda, a local area tough played by Māori actor Pineapple Tangaroa, has a change of heart when Williams commissions him to abet an illegal sting on Mateo. He’s good, huggable people.)
In its anarchic way, Rats! is a deeply political film. One gets the impression of Raphael’s fellow podunk Texans as the types easily gulled by nonsense and bald lies to fill the oval on their ballots for the party working against their interests. At best, Pfresno’s residents are apathetic; at worst they’re deeply immoral. Fry and Nalevansky only have so much time to measure the circumference of their ignorance, and opt for for a dynamic style of fast cuts, scene shifts, and the pell-mell dissemination of Pfresno’s blighted boundaries. It’s a deeply unwell place. The best way to present it is with humor–gallows, slapstick, cringe–and the rapidfire aesthetic of directors like Edgar Wright. Rats! doesn’t linger on scenes for too long. Fry and Nalevansky prefer to let punchlines and shocks breathe long enough to circulate, then move to the next pseudo-vignette for further degradations.
At the same time that Rats! is soul-crushing in terms of its material, though, it’s also buoyant, with Wilcox and Sykes at its center, and Autry slightly off to the side, providing supplementary goodwill. Don’t let the film’s attitude or excess fool you: it takes a dim view of the culture in the neck of the U.S. where it’s set, but nonetheless cares deeply for the people trapped there who deserve to live better lives in better places.
Directors: Carl Fry, Maxwell Nalevansky
Writers: Carl Fry, Maxwell Nalevansky
Starring: Luke Wilcox, Danielle Evon Ploeger, Khali Sykes, Darius Autry, Ariel Ash, Jacob Wysocki, John Ennis, Marc Livingood, Ka5sh
Release Date: February 28, 2025
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.