From Season 2 Stranger Things and further, Joe Keery's character Steve Harrington is one of the most charming and endearing characters in the entire ensemble. It's okay to admit it now: back in the first season Stranger Things you hated Steve's personality. Me too. At the time, Steve “Hair” Harrington was Nancy's arrogant boyfriend who ruled Hawkins and bullied outcasts like Jonathan Byers.
Well, as reprehensible as Steve was in the first season, Joe Keery's role in the 2020 low-budget thriller currently trending on Tube finds him far more reprehensible. In a good way.
Fun is a 2020 dark comedy thriller film made on an undisclosed but clearly limited budget. It was written and directed by Ukrainian-American director Evgeniy Kotlyarenko, and premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. It also had a small theatrical run that brought in $43,000. In all likelihood, with everything going on in 2020, you probably missed it.
Bye Fun also features David Arquette and Saturday Night Live alumni Sasheer Zamata and Kyle Mooney, it's really part of Joe Keery's character, Kurt Kunkle. While Kiri plays the effortlessly cool, charming and sweet guy in Stranger ThingsKurt is clumsy and pathetic and only cares about internet fame, something that even after 10 years of creating what he considers quality content eludes him. His most pronounced character trait is his desperation, which is uncomfortably felt every time he begs someone to follow him or join him in a collaboration.
After the optimistic launch of his Kurtsworld96 channel while he was still in high school, the film flashes forward a decade to see him broken and fed up with it all. The caption reads, “Kurt Kunkle (@kurtsworld96) spent over 10 years posting content in obscurity.” A minute later, after several videos of the now broken Kurt, another caption appears: “April 12, 2019 Kurt finally went viral.”
With this effectively intriguing premise, the film follows Kurt, who is now a driver for a ride-sharing service called Spree. Decorating his car with cameras, he continues to live-stream his every thought and extol the virtues of what he calls “The Lesson.” He then goes on a killing spree, killing one passenger after another using poisoned water bottles. Having thrown out one body, he goes after the next passenger. The entire plan is an attempt to attract subscribers to his livestream, but it fails for several hours until he finds ways to gain popularity with some established influencers, including a comedian played by Zamata.
The film is truly tense as Kurt's bodies pile up and there are several surprises that he doesn't plan for (and the audience probably doesn't see coming). It's also very well told, mostly through live streaming and a bit of found footage. As a thriller, the film is a dark, realistic look at the killers who are widely present in American culture, who seek recognition online, fail, and then decide to take the lives of people in the real world for influence in the virtual one. Unfortunately, in an age where mass murderers live-stream their horrors and killers carve hashtags into their bullets, Kurt's rampage seems very real.
What also seems painfully real is Kurt's lack of remorse. The wannabe streamer feels nothing for those he kills and only complains when it doesn't get him enough followers fast enough. As an audience member, you hate him for it, but he views it as nothing more than another scheme to gain followers, no different from taking on the latest TikTok challenge.
Keery does an exceptional job as Kurt, disappearing into the role of an amoral psychopath who not only looks nothing like Steve Harrington's character, but with his shaggy, unkempt, greasy hair looks nothing like him either. Kurt is not as charming a killer as Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman. American Psychonor is he as intriguing a loner as Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler. Instead, Kiri portrays him as a desperate loser who is unpleasant to watch. You just want to get away from him – credit to Kiri for giving up his considerable charm for a character you never root for.
While the film is an effective thriller, there are few laughs to be had in the dark comedy. Comparing this again with American Psychothere are no deaths as “fun” as Bateman's ax murder of a man in the style of Huey Lewis's It's Fashionable to Be Square. Most people probably haven't met the real Patrick Bateman, so the killer can enjoy his quirks because he seems so foreign. Kurt Kunkle, however, is the killer that we now see constantly in the news, especially in the following years. Fun– so when the film tries to make some of his murders comedic, it comes across as an unfunny, awkward tonal shift rather than something to enjoy. Oddly enough, the film seems to condemn Kurt's amorality even as it asks us to relate to it at times, which is why the thriller part of it actually works while the comedy falls flat.
Despite its shortcomings, which are entirely attributable to the narrative rather than Kiri's performance, the film is actually a solid thriller with an intriguing premise, a clever title and a central performance that demands attention, even if it veers too close to what we see so often in the news.
