Septien

USA / English
Comedy / Drama / Mystery

Drawing inspiration from the likes of outsider art, Southern Gothic fiction, and Victor Erice’s 1973 film The Spirit of the Beehive, Michael Tully’s singular Septien is that rare art-house film that delivers equal measures of laughter, darkness, and beauty. Suddenly and without explanation, Cornelius Rawlings, The Athlete (Tully, in one of the year’s most memorable performances) returns to his family’s Tennessee farm eighteen years after he disappeared. His parents have died, but his two brothers — Ezra, The Matriarch (Robert Longstreet ) and Amos, The Artist (Onur Tukel) — have continued their isolated, idiosyncratic lives on the family farm. The brothers receive the phenomenally bearded Cornelius’ return with equal parts bewilderment and joy, but he remains a mysterious presence in their midst, slipping away occasionally to hustle cash as an unlikely ringer on the basketball and tennis courts…