Fried Barry (2020)

In 2017 Ryan Kruger released a short film featuring a man named Barry (Gary Green) going through various stages of affliction after shooting up heroin in a warehouse.  Enhanced by the music of electronic artist HAEZEN it shows him hallucinating, zoning out and going through withdrawals.  It is shot well, the music enhances the discomfort of watching what Barry goes through and it is a quick bit of surrealistic cinema that highlights Kruger's talents at directing and editing.  There is really no plot to speak of, nor is there meant to be one.  Still, after Kruger took the time to go around promoting the film at festivals and got noticed for it, he was told that what he really needed to do was turn it into a feature.

That he did, releasing a full-length version of Fried Barry in 2020.  Green returns and Barry's addiction problems are covered in the first few scenes.  The movie, though still retaining HAEZEN for the soundtrack and continuing to be quite hallucinogenic in its presentation, deviates wildly from the short.  It's not a stretch to say it's the same character, but it is in many ways a continuation of what happens to the Barry we met in the original.

Barry is a violent addict, neglecting his wife (Chanelle de Jager) and child while he gets drunk, shoots up and gets into confrontations on the street.  One evening while wandering around downtown Cape Town Barry is abducted by aliens who, after doing all the probing they like to do, make Barry's consciousness take a back seat while one of them comes down to do the driving and learn about humanity.

What follows is the alien making its way through various parts of Cape Town, encountering a number of residents out for a good time and eventually making it to a club.  After being taken back to the flat of one of the clubgoers for a casual encounter he again hits the streets, this time meeting a prostitute (Bianka Hartenstein) that he accidentally impregnates.  Barry's wife soon finds him, takes him home and finds him a lot more attentive toward her and his son.  Unfortunately, when withdrawals set in, she loses track of him on the way to the hospital, leading to further encounters with gang members and a pedophilic serial killer (Jonathan Pienaar) before landing in a mental institution.  While his wife searches frantically for him the prostitute finds herself dealing with the strange child Barry has left her to raise. 

Ryan Kruger has stated he took a lot of inspiration from the American movies he loved from the 1980s.  Although he didn't do homages to them in the Quentin Tarantino sense I can see where the references are, from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Starman and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, to name a few.  He also references a movie that, as of this point, I have never seen, which was Flight of the Navigator.  The way it is assembled reminded me much more of a strange, science fiction version of Being There, a 1980 film starring Peter Sellers as a childlike man who people constantly project brilliance upon as he walks from encounter to encounter without much understanding of what is happening.  The alien is quite like that, with many scenes of women expressing sudden sexual desire onto a man like Barry who has a "unique" appearance. 

Much of the movie is carried by the music and the visuals as well as many of the strange characters Barry encounters.  Gary Green is a stuntman that Kruger has used before and is adept at physical acting, but had some reservations about having to carry a film, thus Kruger gave him little dialog.  There was also little script outside of an outline with most of the scenes being done on the fly.  It's an approach that can lead to disaster but in this case lends an additional bit of unpredictability to the story, such as it is.  

There are a number of scenes that are disturbing.  In many, the viewer will be feeling sorry for everything the alien has to go through, despite the fact Barry himself wasn't treated the best in the beginning.  Others are laugh-at-loud hilarious, such as the alien discovering Molly at a rave.  It's not a movie that everyone would like, and Kruger seems to not have been able to progress beyond it yet, but it is an interesting piece of cinema that might just become the cult classic he has tried to promote it as.

Fried Barry (2020)

Time: 99 minutes

Starring: Gary Green, Chanelle de Jager, Bianka Hartenstein

Director: Ryan Kruger