$POSITIONS (2025)

$POSITIONS understands the thing most anxiety movies miss, which is that the panic isn’t the point, the trap is.

Mike Alvarado dumps his savings into a meme coin not because he’s an idiot, though he absolutely is, but because a blue-collar guy in the middle of the country with a brother’s medical bills he can’t cover and a dad whose insurance lapsed has been told his entire life that the lottery is the only exit. This is about crypto the way Uncut Gems is about opals. It’s really about how capitalism sells poor people a casino and calls it opportunity.

The Safdie comparison is unavoidable and Daley knows it: the fast score, the suffocating close-ups, the developmentally disabled brother dragged through the wreckage the way Good Time did it. What lifts it past cosplay is the humor. He plays the spiral for laughs as hard as he plays it for dread, Tom Green energy welded to a full-blown panic attack, and the two never cancel each other out. It helps that he lived it. Daley based it on his own shameful stretch trading crypto during COVID, and you can feel the specificity of a man who knows exactly what refreshing a red number does to a person’s nervous system.

I don’t think crypto is good for a single human soul, and I laughed the whole way through. Renegade indie filmmaking still exists in America, made for no money, raw as hell, true even when it’s completely ridiculous. They don’t make many like this anymore, mostly because everyone who tries steals the anxiety and forgets the heart.

Also on Letterboxd