The Unnamed Footage Festival has a knack for finding and highlighting pitch-perfect influencer horror and this year is no exception. The film in question? Co-writer and director Kay Adelaide’s The Rebrand, a hilarious and creepy look at a lesbian influencer couple on a quest for redemption by any means possible. With a barebones budget and a fountain of creativity, Adelaide and co-writer Nancy Webb craft a scathing look at predatory influencers and the specific kind of toxicity that breeds in queer couples who monetize their relationship.
Nicole (Naomi Silver-Vézina) is a videographer hired by lesbian lifestyle influencer couple Blair (Andi E. McQueen) and Thistle (Nancy Webb). She’s also eight months pregnant, but she desperately needs the job to reserve her new apartment, plus it’s a big paycheck. Blair and Thistle are a famous couple who have made their relationship a business, only for it to all come crashing down when Thistle is caught saying something terrible on camera. They’ve since been canceled, but they’ve hired Nicole to help them with their rebrand and the hard launch of a new era for the couple.
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But as soon as Nicole arrives, the couple’s behavior is comically suspicious. Blair is a golden retriever made human, a silly and sweet masc lesbian with a heart of gold and a head full of mothballs. Her naivety is taken advantage of by the calculating Thistle, the perfectly put-together femme with long hair, perfect nails, and enough blush to choke a horse. Thistle is a performance, everything down to how she breathes is calculated to get what she wants. And she wants more than just a rebrand…
The entire film is framed as a YouTube documentary of sorts, as the story is introduced by a host who lays out our story. By framing the film as such, Adelaide is able to use non-diegetic music and other techniques to uniquely craft the narrative and its presentation in a way that feels familiar, but ridiculous. And that’s really the name of the game in The Rebrand: a ridiculous depiction of an already ridiculous reality.
Often, influencer horror is about general lifestyle influencers, hot people with lots of followers who post about parties, traveling, and spending money. But Adelaide and Webb dig deeper into more niche types of influencers, creating something more focused, which only helps the film’s comedy. As someone who spends a lot of time learning about famous lesbian couples on TikTok and their multi-layered breakups, I am the very specific target audience for a film like this. But, even if you aren’t on queer TikTok, The Rebrand will still resonate.
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And that’s thanks to a phenomenal trio of actors who each deliver stellar performances that capture your attention and never let go until the film’s hilarious final frames. McQueen is especially endearing as the himbo girlfriend who only owns muscle tees and can barely read a paragraph. Her wide eyes and excitable demeanor make Thistle’s cruel treatment even more heartbreaking. Speaking of Thistle, Webb knows how to create a campy villain a la Faye Dunaway in Mommy Dearest. She and McQueen together meld perfectly to create a stereotypical lesbian influencer couple we love to hate on our social media feeds.
Silver-Vézina balances the scales as the only character who feels even remotely human, which is fitting as we’re seeing through her eyes for almost the entirety of The Rebrand. Her ability to still stand out between McQueen and Webb hamming it up is a testament to her acting skills
The Rebrand is a found footage hit that’s funny, weird, and gay as hell. It’s about time found footage got more explicitly queer and Adelaide is leading the charge with her film. Let this be the start of a new era of queer found footage that looks at messy lesbians, evil bisexuals, and everything in between.
Summary
It’s about time found footage got more explicitly queer and Adelaide is leading the charge with her film. Let this be the start of a new era of queer found footage that looks at messy lesbians, evil bisexuals, and everything in between.
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