The Ambiguous Perfection of Littermates (Exclusive)
Oliver Woolf, Joey Bader, Kaylee McGregor (Alamo Drafthouse)
One of the more intense theater experiences I’ve had this year, the only word I can muster up about Littermates is ambiguous. The film itself is less the psychological horror it was billed as, and more an absurdist semi-comedic drama. The absurd is cut from the same head scratching cloth as a Brain Donors or Airplane, except instead of one confused chuckle after the next, your chuckle is followed by a healthy dose of anxiety, consistently braced for impact through the film.
Littermates is a slow burn type of flick, but it challenges you in a way that’s unexpected in cinema. Instead of a full gratification and answering every question, many threads are left untied, leaving the viewer to play out their own theaters of the mind.
“We really didn't want to hold the audience's hand whatsoever throughout the film because we trust the audience,” director Scott Tinkham told me during our conversation during Fantastic Fest. “It's kind of just like a taste thing. We kind of want to throw it like bait and switch people into thinking one thing, and then we do another thing and all of that.”
“To us, the film is also a lot about the cycle of life and parenthood and family,” director Michael Woloson added. “How you're raised and your parents take care of you growing up, and then eventually you are kind of their caretaker, and so the cycle of that being part of the story as well, I think plays into that kind of theme.”
The film follows Liam (Bader, in a truly compelling performance), a man who appears from the woods with a nosebleed and is cared for by Chester (Woolf). Liam’s childlike wonder is amplified as he regains his voice and settles into what appears to be a new reality for him, all while the property is surrounded by war. With the introduction of Mel (McGregor), the two become similar to siblings, with a rivalry between them angling for Chester’s attention and approval.
Chester always feels situated on the border of nurturing and sinister. Woolf says that the film having only one insight to who he was before the war broke out allowed him to play the character in a much more mysterious way, and agreed with my assessment of the double feeling the character gives through the film.
“I think what you were talking about nails it, wanting the one thing he can sort of control as being the 2 people in the house. I like even like going into it, I just like the idea of him just being this sort of aloof character.”
Without giving too much away from the film (spoiler free piece, pal), I asked Bader and Woolf whether they had been given their character’s full backstories before filming. Bader said he wasn’t given anything, but said Tinkham was incredibly collaborative through the process and allowed him to freely explore it. Woolf, on the other hand, said that they reverse engineered an entire story about Chester in order for him.
“A backstory kind of had to exist because there's so many drafts of the script where I had to like really think about, okay, why is this guy here alone? You know, what age is he? Like, who is this dude, and what happened to his parents and all this kind of thing? Whatever is his true intentions, and the true intentions kind of like informed his backstory, which I will never tell you.”
The ambiguity is what makes Littermates such an enjoyable watch. Woloson said they didn’t want to hold the audience’s hand through the story, and although they got notes from the audiences that they wanted more revealed earlier, which he called “sensible”, the trust they had in their vision kept them on path.
“I think for us it was about leaving the breadcrumb trail for them to follow along, and hopefully the movie is interesting enough to them just from, from a visual and character and action standpoint to where they can feel like these filmmakers know what they're doing. We can follow this until they give us the information we're craving.”
“It is a taste thing,” Tinkham adds. “It frustrates a lot of audiences as well, which I totally understand. Everybody has their own tastes and wants and needs in movies and everything. We've seen so many films before, and we didn't set out to make a movie movie. We set out to make something very niche, very specific, and that would make us laugh, and that's all. That was just the what we set out to do, the goal.”
Littermates will open in over 30 Alamo Drafthouse locations on November 6, 2026. Tickets can be found at this link.
