Bougie Brooklynites behave badly in this queer COVID-set comedy straight from Sundance.

It’s mid-2020 in New York City, a hothouse of COVID anxiety and horniness kept in check only by curfews and social distancing. Yet, when 19-year-old model Bahlul ends up holed up in the home of his hectic uncle Terry (cult comedian John Early), all that well-managed isolation turns into sheer chaos, as massage therapist Karla (director Theda Hammel), struggling novelist Vanessa, MAGA-pilled neighbour Coco, and hot delivery boy Ronald – as well as Terry’s ex-husband, Leo, and new boyfriend, Hamadou – each scheme to get their piece of him.

Serving as star, writer, director, editor and composer, Hammel stakes a claim as a multi-hyphenate to watch with this wild debut. Blessed with chaotic energy, Stress Positions delivers an unsparing satire of its clueless and self-obsessed denizens, whose performative progressiveness and competitive identity politics only serve to camouflage their ignorance. But as the perspective shifts from the sarcastic Karla to the sincere Bahlul, we pass from an insider’s to an outsider’s view – one that understands that there’s a big world out there beyond Brooklyn brownstones.

“If you have to be transported back to 2020, it might as well be with Stress Positions, a deft comedy … that’s part farce and part brutal satire of the queer Brooklyn bourgeoisie.” – GQ