It’s pretty interesting how local filmmaker Joe Badon’s previous feature film The God Inside My Ear was replicated – by wholesale or coincidence – in the Netflix film Horse Girl, and yet still retains a special mind and voice that can’t be copied in any way. The sheer cacophony of influences that come out of Badon’s skull, from the glory of b-movies to the depths of occult lore, can leave any audience fascinated and frustrated in equal measure. This is all too true for his latest movie Sister Tempest, but a bit more than God Inside My Ear, the reward in watching this vision play is wholeheartedly worth the time spent in the stream.
Badon is a filmmaker, illustrator and musician born and raised in Slidell. His first feature film, The God Inside My Ear, had an award-winning festival run and was distributed through Gravitas Ventures. He has also worked as an illustrator on storyboards for a number of films and commercials including Keanu (2016), My Name is Jonah (2014).
“Sister Tempest was inspired by my love for weird cinema,” says the filmmaker. “Movies like Zardoz, Mulholland Drive, and the Monkees’ Head were inspirations for the script, look and feel of the film. I wrote the script in 2018 and launched a Kickstarter soon afterward. We raised $25,000 for the preproduction and production of the project. Then we raised another $2,500 through IndieGoGo for post-production.”
Absolutely, this film cannot and will not be made again.
Tempest unfolds through various layers of fabric-like space and time, sometimes smoothly and sometimes roughly, sometimes uncomfortably and sometimes unnaturally. It’s the broken-up story of a broken young woman who must confront her broken reality of her broken relationship with her sister. Told almost in a Russian Nesting Doll manner, with what feels like false starts and tricks upon tricks, Tempest uses multiple points of view – sometimes within the same scene and with multiple tones – to create a kaleidoscopic-scape of sci-fi, horror, and melodrama that in some very shocking ways, accurately depicts and conveys the feeling of going through exposure therapy and then some. Mental illness plays heavily in the film, with suggestive expressions of PTSD and Schizophrenia, likely among others. The God Inside My Ear walked so this movie could run.
Colors and creatures, satirical and trippy theatrics line the walls and floors of this cinematic hall of mirrors, even at its most highfalutin. Through many sequences, as was the truth with Badon’s other effort, things are either overwritten or way too wordy. Self-indulgence? Unawareness? It could be either, but maybe Badon just has his own way of creating and producing scenes upon scenes, and pulling together fragments upon fragments, to make a whole from what started in pieces.
Indeed, Sister Tempest has little ground to plant one’s feet on, as it throws us down a rabbit hole at the opening second, with speed only picking up. Watching all of this occur, like dreams within dreams within unreliable protagonists being observed by unknown but all-knowing forces, will likely drive people to madness. It’s a spiral within a spiral, but the view can be amazing if you just let it be. For its wild tendencies, the film does – very spectacularly – grow much clearer and more comfortable as the horror ramps up to a stunning conclusion that’ll stick around with everyone long after the ending. It starts as the movie equivalent of having confetti thrown in your face, only to resolve and become the moment before Carrie gets covered in blood at the school dance.
From peak to peak, Sister Tempest is the surprise any moviegoer can hope for from something so dangerously out of the ordinary. There are many rough edges, but so what? There can be much confusion, but why not? There is plenty to absorb, but… that’s ok. That’s very ok. Can the same be said for the majority of other “mainstream” oddities? Let them try and make their own Sister Tempest. Let them.
