Six men lie face down on the ground, licking a deserted Los Angeles street

It’s a stomach-churning introduction, but “Sour Minnows” is not a conventional tale. It’s a movie about roommates Ricky (David Brown, “Jury Duty”) and Tepper (Chase Williamson, “The Guest”) who one day accidentally enter a different plane of existence while shopping. Soon, increasingly strange events happen to the duo and Ricky’s girlfriend, Aura (Suzanna Son, “Red Rocket”), and Ricky becomes a victim of “The Yellow Thing,” a being that temporarily takes over his skin and clothes him.

Does it sound strange? Is! But Harrison Atkins’ second feature film, following 2015’s “Lace Crater,” is packed with indelible images that will have adventurous film buffs talking. Atkins spoke with Variety after its world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival about the ideas behind the film, the search for truth in surrealism, and the pleasure of reading reviews.

What was the genesis of the idea for this film?

I had been trying to make a larger-scale movie for a while in Los Angeles, and the movies I write are kind of weird. For this film, I did about 40 drafts and had actors attached. He moved at such a glacial pace: two steps forward, one step back. I had meetings where I was having lunch with frat guys who were like, “Oh, this is a great script. Of course, we could never finance it.” And then I started thinking, “Man, I’m finding myself developing this other movie and sanding off its rough edges to try to fit it into a box to attract money. What would I be doing if I were making a movie that wasn’t for sale at all?” And I started to find myself writing poetry. The poetry had a kind of film form. The film was originally an eight-page document, and it continued to expand until it was 80-odd pages, and was a cross between a screenplay and a poem. I wasn’t entirely sure how I could do it, but I kept thinking about it. It finally reached a boiling point where I realized I had to make it through or else I was going to die.

Is there any truth you can achieve by keeping things on the weirder side compared to if you tried to cram these same ideas into a more conventional project?

What attracts me most is cinema and the formal language that reminds us that the medium is young. I really want to evoke sensations, tones or moods that are inaccessible in other art forms and that cannot be expressed in words. I think a lot about the Edward Hopper quote: “If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” So I’m trying to tune into something I don’t have words for. I think that what we call “strange” here is almost aberrant. I find the delicious, juicy sensation I pursue at the intersection of opposite meanings.

I try not to intellectualize too much where the stories or images come from. I try not to look a gift horse in the mouth in terms of what happens to my imagination when this comes up. But I do repeatedly find these images that are perhaps associated with the supernatural or perhaps with the strange. These things seem to invade my work, whether as a byproduct or out of necessity, as I search for this third transcendent thing that arises from the friction between two things.

What ideas were you considering while developing this film that shaped the final product?

I think the film is perhaps inherently a post-pandemic film. There’s something about the alienation between characters, friends who become strangers, people who have wildly different experiences of reality, almost postmodern bubbles, that I think reflects how we’re all increasingly isolated in our little Internet feeding tubes. We all have our own programming that we watch and, increasingly, our intake is increasingly different from each other.

I think there’s something about that condition of modernity that permeates the film and, perhaps in ways that are sub-intellectual to me, it just mixed with my trying to intuitively channel what was coming out, this more guttural form of the writing process for me, which allowed the ideas to flow into the film rather than trying to shape them into a more traditional narrative form, into something more like a hero’s journey or a three-act structure. I tried not to filter or shape what was coming in and just let it show me its shape. So I think to whatever extent it’s a mirror of reality or the time we’re in, some of those things are just emergent.

When you do a project like this that gets people talking, do you read and process some of the comments that are written about it online?

This idea of ​​trying to make a movie that can’t be put into words… It’s exciting to me to see how the world is trying to put it into words because there’s an inherent tension between those ideas. I actually find it really funny how people try to describe the movie, because I don’t know how to describe it. To some extent I’m not even trying to describe the movie. So hearing other people pick up on those words is kind of delightful to me. I don’t know if I’m looking for everything everyone says about the movie, but I’m glad to read what people think. Sometimes I talk to people about what they think. It’s a lot of fun for me to get that feedback.

Gersh represents “Sour Minnows” for worldwide sales while seeking distribution.