Not long before they absconded to Poland to make a movie with Charli XCX at the height of Brat mania, Jeremy O. Harris and director Pete Ohs spent two weeks making a very different movie in the wilderness — upstate Massachusetts, that is. Alongside The Afterparty’s Zoë Chao, Callie Hernandez from The Flight Attendant and Alien: Covenant, and Harris’s Slave Play collaborator James Cusati-Moyer, the quintet co-wrote and shot an arch body-horror psychodrama using a loose premise and a look book heavy on Cries and Whispers imagery. “You’re not supposed to mix Bergman with Beyond Fest,” Ohs jokes.
The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick premiered earlier this month at South by Southwest, ushering in what could be a big year for Ohs and Harris. Ohs had edited the documentary Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play., and Harris was attracted to his fluid Mike Leigh–ish filmmaking process, which he’d also employed on the similarly microbudget indies Jethica and Everything Beautiful Is Far Away (the latter starring Julia Garner). So they decided to make one themselves. What resulted is a chamber piece about a dispirited urbanite named Yvonne (Chao) who retreats to a country house where her friend (Hernandez) is residing with a couple (Harris and Cusati-Moyer) who rattle off crunchy platitudes about mugwort, organic produce, and the restorative power of a sunrise.
The film runs a lean 80 minutes, dipping into Get Out and Rosemary’s Baby territory as Yvonne begins to doubt — and then reluctantly embrace — the eeriness of her roommates’ rustic nonchalance. When Yvonne discovers a tick bite on her upper back one morning, the others assure her it’s nothing a little clove oil or black walnut can’t fix. The hallmark of The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick is the sense of dread that mounts while Yvonne grows more and more susceptible to a figment of utopia built on wellness pseudoscience. Any city dweller knows what it’s like to make a brief escape to greener pastures, but what happens when that exodus becomes an entire doxycycline-agnostic lifestyle?
Jeremy O. Harris (left) and Pete Ohs. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Robby Klein/Getty Images
Ohs and his cast originally intended to make a sexier movie, but they were operating with a SAG-strike production waiver and couldn’t afford to hire an intimacy coordinator. Around that time, Harris had been hanging out with wealthy fashion types who would casually reference their tick-induced Lyme disease — the same condition that Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alumna Yolanda Hadid once compared to HIV. Ohs created a loose outline satirizing the sometimes–galaxy-brained wellness industry that’s reportedly worth upwards of $6 billion. In the Berkshires, he and the cast used a shared Notes-app page to write dialogue as the shoot unfolded, working their way toward an 11th-hour twist. They went to Goodwill to pick out costumes and lived together in the rental house seen in Tick, cooking, cleaning, and checking one another for bites in ways that mirrored their characters’ behavior.
“It does match my own writing in some ways because I like to take a bold swing at the start and not know where I’m gonna end up,” Harris told Vulture at the W Austin hotel during SXSW. “I didn’t know what the third act was. What I did know was that I wanted to start off that first scene of Slave Play the way you see it. I wanted it to be like, Where the fuck are they? And then, at some point, you were going to realize they were in group therapy with this weird sex that we’re seeing.”
Harris and Ohs, having encountered Charli XCX around 3 a.m. at the Lower East Side bar Clandestino about a month before Brat came out, made Erupcja that way, too. It’s one of several forthcoming roles for Charli, a cinephile who, according to Harris, bumps Criterion titles left and right. (Her other future club classics include Gregg Araki’s first film in 11 years, a Faces of Death remake, and an A24 pop-star mockumentary that she originated.) But whereas Tick was made in isolation, Erupcja (which does not yet have a release date or distributor) roves through Warsaw, hence why news of the production leaked last August. People who enjoyed Charli’s hyperclubby Grammys performance in February (and pretty much everything she has done in the past year) might be surprised to learn that she wanted to play against type here. She’s portraying a shy tourist modeled off a famous indie-rock friend of hers.
“She met Pete, they talked about movies, and she was like, ‘I’ll do one,’” Harris says. “That’s literally how it happened. It wasn’t about calling managers and agents. She was like, ‘This feels like making an album.’ But, also, Pete gives you the platform to play something you’ve never played before. I came to Tick, and I was like, ‘I’m on Emily in Paris, and I’m always playing big and brash with the loudest costumes.’ The lowest-energy thing I can play is really funny for me. I think the experience for Charli was, I’ve been playing Charli XCX for so long now. What would it be like to play this new person?”
