I’m Not Sorry is the perfect film to set the tone for the beginning of the week. And it is certainly one that will stay with you for weeks to come. This film, which premiered at SXSW, is unsettling, disturbing, and macabrely funny. I’m Not Sorry follows the appropriately named Barron, a lonely, horny, and self-loathing man eager to find a mate. He joins a dating site, but upon viewing the competition he begins to delve even deeper into self-loathing. While creating his profile, he opts to pose as a man named Larry, using an image of an attractive man based off a basic internet search in lieu of his own photo, and sparks the interest of a beautiful young woman named Jeniffer.

Director Russell Costanzo does a fantastic job of capturing Barron’s acute self-loathing and desperation. As viewers we spend a great amount of time becoming acquainted with Barron’s character not only as he is by himself behind closed doors, but how he sees and thinks about himself. We intimately see his habits, his tendencies, and watch his inner thought process as he experiences his lonely life and navigates the web. The character himself is interesting, because while his habits are certainly not praiseworthy, there’s a part of his character that we simultaneously feel sorry for and identify with. When asked about what inspired this film and this character Costazo tells us “I was about to become a father for the first time and so questions about who I was vs who I wanted to be started filling my head – fear of change might’ve been a part of the process – that led me to start developing a character that was so filled with self-loathing that he wasn’t able to open himself up to love.”

Costanzo has a strong directorial presence with a subtly raw yet sophisticated editing style and great music choice. But what lies beneath this aesthetically clean yet surreal film is extraordinarily interesting. In many ways this film touches on the notion of expectations. What we expect of others, what they expect of us, and what we expect of ourselves. And to some extent what it’s like to live with these unmet expectations, or even worse, what it’s like when, after years of disappointment, how we respond when something meets these expectations. It also passively addresses, albeit in a bit of a more extreme and nuanced manner, how normalized and pervasive the essence of anonymity and the internet has become. In some ways we’re all putting ideal versions of ourselves out into the internet on our various social media outlets. And we’ve become so accustomed to understanding the nature of online personas versus real life personas that we don’t find it particularly bizarre when who we encounter beyond the screen is not who or what we’d expect.