Erica Orofino’s Dirty Bad Wrong is a tremendous short story that focuses on the relationship between mother and child and a person’s relationship with their own body. With little notes of body horror sprinkled through the drama that allows Michaela Kurimsky to give a convincing performance as someone deeply conflicted about what to do next.
Desperate to keep her promise to host the best superhero party for her 6-year-old, young mother, Sid (Michaela Kurimsky), a sex worker, takes extreme measures and books a last-minute client (Cody Ray Thompson) with a dark fetish.
When you are a parent, you will do anything for your child, so what do you do if your young son says he would like a superhero party? Well, of course, you go all out to give them the best superhero party ever. When push comes to shove, you do whatever you can for your child, which is the desperate situation. Sid finds herself in writer/director Erica Orofino’s short film Dirty Bad Wrong.
Michaela Kurimsky gives a strong performance in this short as the conflicted Sid. She plays the character with equal amounts of strength and eventual resignation as she realises there are options left to her if she wants to fund her son’s party.
Orofino can strike a fair few points across in the 14 minutes of Dirty Bad Wrong; predominantly, she centres on the ideas of relationships, be it with your own body or the one as a mother. Sid ensures that what is and has been done to her is in hidden places and that she can go around in a normal fashion with no one knowing what she does to earn her money. It’s telling later in the film that we see another person with marks on their body who is equally aware of the stigma of those markings on a place on their body that is difficult to hide. Are the markings a metaphor for something else in relation to a woman, how she feels about her body, and the actions she takes with it? Orofino leaves that up in the air for you to ponder.
What she doesn’t leave you to ponder, though, is the relationship between a mother and her child. Sid loves Jesse with every fibre of her being. She allows Jesse to be whoever they feel comfortable being with no recriminations. It’s a fabulous connection built here, allowing us to empathise with Sid and her situation. She wants the best for her child, as any parent would. Orofino and Kurimsky ensure that this is put across as an integral theme to Dirty Bad Wrong. Even while Sid inevitably takes that booking with John Doe, you know her mind is away somewhere else, thinking of her child.
When it comes to the actual act that John Doe commits on Sid, an interesting couple of questions arise from it. What is the intent of this fetish? Is there something perhaps more not said about it that could open the film up to be more of a creature horror, or is it really just a weirdly dark fetish? We also see that John Doe takes as much care as possible when committing the act, numbing agents and ensuring the person he has done this to is medically looked after. It’s all so mysterious but intriguing. What sticks out more is that while he does look after Sid to a point, he doesn’t do a great job of hiding what he does; a certain type of procedure would make such marks less distinguishable.
Again, it is little notes added by Orofino’s script for Dirty Bad Wrong that have you leaning that little bit forward, wanting to learn more about the world she crafted here. Still, she keeps us at arm’s length, deliciously so, in fact. She knows we would want to learn more, yet she focuses on the main thread of the story about the relationship Sid has with her child and her body. It’s excellent to be so confident in your story that you can toss these little moments into your film without detaining from the main point you are presenting. It is an excellent film from top to bottom; you can only be impressed with what was accomplished here.
★★★★
For more of our coverage of Fantasia Festival 2024 please check out our reviews below:
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