Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B-

Sometimes a movie is thematically ambitious in a way the production can’t keep up. Such appears to be the case with Chained for Life, a movie deemed so obscure that it plays exclusively today and tomorrow at the SIFF Film Center at Seattle Center, destined to be watched eventually on some streaming service by . . . almost no one. It’s true the showing I attended was the first of the day at 3 p.m., but still only five people in the audience seems a little sparse. This movie is far from perfect but it deserves better than that.

Then again, it could be argued it deserves better than an editing style that only serves to rob the narrative of any real clarity. Writer-director Aaron Schimberg is clearly influenced by Robert Altman, both with his multiple characters talking over each other and with camera movements that quickly zoom in on faces with a semi-rapidly veering style that feels like a reference to a bygone era of cinema. He also has something to say about beauty, and about how people with disabilities or deformities find their way into a culture’s ongoing narrative of beauty.

Chained for Life is a movie-within-a-movie, about the production of a movie called Marked for Life, in which disfigured people meet up with a doctor who can offer them miracle corrective surgeries. But, before any such surgery occurs, blind woman Mabel (Jess Weixler) falls in love with Rosenthal, who has neurofibromatosis, a condition which causes noncancerous tumors to grow along someone’s nerves. Rosenthal is played by Adam Pearson — previously seen in a small part in 2014’s Under the Skin — who actually has the same condition.

In fact, Weixler and Pearson are surrounded by a supporting cast playing characters who also have the same respective conditions they have in real life. Or at least, they do inside the movie-within-the-movie. It’s unclear how for real-real all the conditions are, such as the “hermaphrodite” who presents as two genders literally split down the middle, or the pair of young women who are conjoined twins. Some of them are unavoidably authentic, such as the super-tall man, or the little person, or the little person who is also a wheelchair user.

Watching Chained for Life, it feels like this ambiguity is the point, and I’m just not sure how effective that is. I left the movie having no idea what I was supposed to have gotten out of it, although it certainly has some compelling and provocative ideas. Schimberg deliberately blurs the lines between fact and fiction, though, regularly cutting from dialogue between cast and crew on the set of Marked for Life, directly to a scene of dialogue between the “othered” characters, only after several minutes revealing they are actually acting out a scene rather than having a real conversation outside the making of the movie. There’s even one sequence that is rather shocking and later reveals itself not to be either an on-set scene or a “real world” occurrence, but rather some kind of projected dark fantasy. At least, I think it was.

Chained for Life seems a little like a modern take on the 1932 film Freaks, with that famous scene of “circus freaks” chanting the phrase “One of us! One of us!” It’s definitely a point of reference for Schimberg, where he sort of flips that narrative, having that very phrase repeated by a couple of the so-called “normal” people.

I keep wondering how the disabled and/or disfigured actors felt about this movie, and their involvement with it. It’s easy to assume they we on board with however Schimberg’s script appeared to them, although of course they would not have any idea while filming how it would look edited and on camera (although, ironically, there is a scene in which all said characters gather in a small screening room to watch dailies). On the other hand, it’s also easy to imagine actors with all manner of disabilities, who get very few acting opportunities otherwise, simply being happy for the work. Does this movie make sense to them? Does it matter?

From scene to scene, I found Chained for Life compelling enough, until it jumped to another scene that deliberately avoided making clear whether we were supposed to take it at face value or as a performance of a scene on set. Even the acting skill among this ensemble cast is all over the place, and it’s hard to tell if a lot of them are just supposed to be playing bad actors, or if the acting just isn’t great on average in this movie. Nearly all of them range from wooden to noticeably performative, even when we’re watching crew members talk amongst themselves.

The critical consensus for this movie seems to be pretty positive, although I can’t help but wonder how much of that is informed by condescension. I was more bemused by it than anything.

*Contemplating the film’s own question, “Is this exploitative”? First let’s try to make sense of the story.*

Overall: B-