Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, two of the most interesting and rewarding directors working in modern horror and science fiction (Resolution (2012), Spring (2014), The Endless (2017), Synchronic (2019) et al) weren’t going to let the inconvenience of COVID lockdowns get in their way. Developed and shot over the course of a year in Los Angeles lockdown with a tiny crew, a few indie filmmaker friends as additional cast and largely featuring the two directors in the only sizable roles, Something in the Dirt is a physically small film, shot in and around Benson’s own apartment, but typical of the duo, it explores huge, often unfathomable ideas that boggle the mind and will challenge the patience of those in need of easy answers.

Slacker barman Levi (Benson) has just moved into a shabby apartment in a run-down block where the only other resident appears to be John (Moorhead), a maths teacher and member of a strange evangelical apocalyptic church (are we meant to make something of the characters’ Biblical names perhaps?) Wildfires rage in the hills around them as the two strike up a friendship, Levi an under-achiever, John still coming to terms with his divorce from his husband. Almost immediately, they start to notice that things are somewhat awry with Levi’s apartment, which has lain empty for many years, as they watch a crystal ashtray rise into the air, casting strange patterns of light around the room. They decide to try to capture the phenomenon on camera, planning to make a documentary that they can sell to Netflix. A mysterious symbol is spotted around town, strange voices are heard on the radio and crystalline, quartz-like structures start intruding into the apartment. Levi begins to worry that they’ve stumbled onto something dangerous (“is it possible this is extremely dangerous, and we just completely overlooked that part?” he wonders) but John is determined to see the project through to the end, even when gravity itself starts to fail…

At first, the title seems like it might be ironic as the duo are more concerned with things in the air above them – the (apocalyptic) wildfires are being fought by ever-present helicopters, they’re under the flightpath of Los Angeles airport, objects levitate, and the apartment block is haunted by a strange electrical hum coming from overhead cables and electricity meters. It’s only halfway through the film, when they discover a tape recorder hidden in the dirt beneath the building and a talking head geologist suggests that the two men may have been affected by an unusually large amount of chromium and lead in the surrounding soil that the title starts to become relevant. The tape in the recovered player carries the number 1908, a number that has seemingly coincidental meaning for Levi but which, like everything else in the film, remains tantalisingly a mystery to the rest of us.

This was a technique used in all of their previous films, a sense that meaning was just beyond our grasp as characters deal with all manner of inexplicable, possibly alien, phenomena, weirdness to which there was likely never to be an answer that human beings could easily process.  Previous films had been linked in a sort of low-key shared universe (Resolution and The Endless feature the same UFO cult and a character charmingly named “Shitty Carl” who gets a name check in Spring, while Synchronic features a billboard advertising the same Arcadia Beer seen in The Endless and all of them feature a mysterious red flower.)

And Something in the Dirt seems to belong in that strange little fictional universe too – Arcadia Beer turns up again, Levi and one of the characters in Resolution share the same surname and perhaps most conclusively, Moorhead tweeted that it was “in the CarlVerse!” (2022 also saw them joining that other fictional multiverse at Marvel – they directed episodes of the Disney+ mini-series Moon Knight.) It all adds up to a very large canvas that is never completely visible and is still being painted on, a glimpse at an universe next door that only superficially resembles our own. Whether there’s any grand plan at work here, whether the meaning of the red flowers will ever be revealed or if the true extent of the connective tissue between all the films will ever finally be revealed remains to be seen, but for now the films make up a very satisfying puzzle.

And there are puzzles within Something in the Dirt too. It’s a puzzle box in its own right, a heady mix of the autobiographical (Levi and John meet in much the same way that Benson and Moorhead did), films-within-a-film (we see some of the footage that the two men record interspersed with talking head footage commenting on the same footage, ominously referring to “the dead one” when talking about Levi and John), odd in-jokes (Levi’s late sister is named Crystal) and two highly unreliable narrators. Levi is just a slacker looking for any kind of meaning to help him through the tragedies of his life while John is driven by his religious beliefs, his devotion to a church that seems unwilling to accept his homosexuality. The two men constantly lie, to us, to each other and to themselves and the film they’re making – and consequently the one we’re watching – is no more truthful, the duo resorting to recreating some scenes using CGI after their hard drives are damaged.

It could have become terribly self-indulgent, a film about the making of itself or something very much like itself, but a sense of humour and the likably oddball lead characters compensate and prevent that from happening. At one point, the duo attempts to communicate with whatever alien force is behind the mysterious happenings using an acoustic guitar and a Theremin, a tip of the hat perhaps to the musical language used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Elsewhere, they’re so useless that Levi can’t even mount an iPhone on its tripod, and they find themselves easily side-tracked from their mission by staging eccentric photoshoots around the apartment.

But all this levity is wrapped around a jet-black core of utter seriousness. The two men spend the entire film talking themselves and each other into madness, obsession and conspiracy, their psychological scars exposed by their exposure to the phenomenon. Levi eventually reveals that he spent time in a psychiatric hospital (1908 days in fact…) after his sister’s death and John becomes increasingly obsessed with mathematical and numerological concepts that neither of them really understand. They’re too busy floundering about, desperately searching for answers and meaning (neither of which is ever forthcoming) to really notice just how much danger they’re in.

The claustrophobia of the flat (they do venture outside but infrequently), the heavyweight debates about maths, constant intrusions from their pasts and the suspicion from the very start (particularly acute if you’ve seen their other films) that Benson and Moorhead aren’t going to do anything as obvious as provide an explanation may be too much for many. But for those already sold on the weirdness of the “CarlVerse” will be more than rewarded by diving back in again (and again, and again… one viewing of a Benson and Moorhead film is never going to be enough) to experience a world at once increasingly familiar yet as alien and inscrutable as ever. Newcomers, however, would be advised to start with Resolution of The Endless to get the lie of the land before venturing this deep into their very strange world.