From season 2 of Stranger Things and onward, Joe Keery’s character Steve Harrington is one of the most charming, lovable characters in the entire ensemble. It’s OK to admit it now: way back in the first season of Stranger Things you hated the character of Steve. So did I. Back then, Steve “The Hair” Harrington was Nancy’s arrogant jock boyfriend who ruled Hawkins high and bullied outcasts like Jonathan Byers.
Well, as loathsome as season 1 Steve was, Joe Keery’s role in a low-budget 2020 thriller, which is presently blowing up on Tubi, finds him to be infinitely more reprehensible. In a good way.
Spree is a 2020 black-comedy thriller made on an undisclosed, but clearly shoestring, budget. It was written and directed by Ukrainian-American filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko and premiered at Sundance in 2020. It also had a brief theatrical run that brought in $43,000. In all likelihood, with everything going on in 2020, you probably missed it.
While Spree also includes David Arquette and Saturday Night Live alumni Sasheer Zamata and Kyle Mooney, it’s really a character piece on Joe Keery’s character, Kurt Kunkle. While Keery plays an effortlessly cool, charming, lovable guy on Stranger Things, Kurt is awkward and pathetic and cares only about internet fame, something that even after 10 years of making what he believes is quality content, eludes him. His most pronounced character trait is his desperation, which you uncomfortably feel every time he pleads with someone to follow him or join him in a collab.
After an optimistic launch of his channel “Kurtsworld96” when he is still in high school, the movie jumps forward a decade to see him broken and fed up with it all. A caption reads “Kurt Kunkle (@kurtsworld96) spent over 10 years posting content in obscurity.” A minute later, after a few clips of the now-broken Kurt, another caption reads “On April 12th, 2019, Kurt finally went viral.”
With that effectively intriguing hook, the movie follows Kurt, now a driver for a rideshare service called Spree., Having decked out his car with cameras, he continues to livestream his every thought and extols the virtues of something he calls “The Lesson.” He then engages in a killing spree, taking the life of one passenger after another with the use of poisoned water bottles. After he dumps one body, he’s off to pick up his next passenger. The entire plan is an effort to gain followers on his livestream, which fails for several hours until he finds ways to gain some traction with some established influencers, including a comedian played by Zamata.
The movie is genuinely tense as the bodies stack up for Kurt and there are several surprises that he doesn’t plan on (and the audience likely won’t foresee). It’s also very well told mostly through livestreams and a little bit of found footage. As a thriller, the movie is a dark, realistic look at the kind of killers all too present in American culture who seek acceptance online, fail, and then decide to take lives in the real world for clout in a virtual one. Sadly, in an era when mass killers are livestreaming their horrors and assassins are carving hashtags onto their bullets, Kurt’s rampage feels entirely real.
What also seems skincrawingly real is Kurt’s lack of remorse. The streamer wannabe feels nothing for those he kills and only complains when it doesn’t bring him more followers fast enough. As an audience member you hate him for it, but he treats it as nothing different than just a latest scheme to gain some followers, no different than giving in to the latest TikTok challenge.
Keery handles the character of Kurt exceptionally well, disappearing into the role of an amoral psychopath that not only feels nothing like the character of Steve Harrington, but with his shaggy, unkempt, greasy hair, looks nothing like him either. Kurt isn’t a charming killer like Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, nor is he an intriguing loner like Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler. Instead, Keery plays him as a desperate loser who is cringey to watch. You just want to get away from him — a credit to Keery for switching off his considerable charm for a character that you never root for.
While the movie is an effective thriller, there’s little to laugh at as far as the pitch-black comedy is concerned. Comparing it again with American Psycho, there’s no “funny” deaths like Bateman’s axing a man to death to Huey Lewis’ “Hip to be Square.” Most people probably haven’t met a real-life Patrick Bateman, so the killer can be enjoyed for his quirks because he seems so foreign. Kurt Kunkle, however, is the kind of killer we see on the news all the time now — especially in the years after Spree’s release — so when the movie tries to make some of his killings seem comical, it comes off as an unfunny, awkward tonal shift than it does something to indulge in. Confusingly, the movie seems to condemn Kurt’s amorality, while occasionally asking us to relate to it, which is why the thriller part of it really works and the comedy falls flat.
Despite its flaws, which are placed entirely on the narrative and not Keery’s performance, the movie really is a solid thriller with an intriguing premise, a clever title, and a central performance that demands to be checked out, even if it rings too close to what we so often see on the news.
