Film Title: Dance Freak
Directors: Alan Resnick, Robby Rackleff
Cast: Robby Rackleff, Megan Koester, Stavros Halkias, Sheila Mears, Sarah Sherman, Conner O’Malley
Writer: Alan Resnick, Robby Rackleff
Production: Crowdfunded (Budget: ~$40–45K) Complete Inverse
Release Date: September 27, 2025 (Tallahassee Film Festival) / Fantasia Fest 2026 Premiere
Watched on: Fantasia Film Festival from Australia
Review by: Mother of Movies
This review contains no major plot spoilers, but the spoiler section below digs into the film’s thematic core and the logic of its ending. Read the main review freely; enter the spoiler cards only after you’ve seen Dance Freak.
Dance Freak opens with a man who looks like he’s been living in his own filth, stained shirt, sweat-soaked and hollow-eyed, stepping out of a building while birds attack him in graphic overlay. This is Obie. This is also the entire ethos of the film: ordinary humiliation rendered in horror-movie language. What Resnick and Rackleff have engineered at Fantasia Fest 2026 is a $45,000 map in translating emotional insides into visual weirdness. Well, at least, that’s my take.
The premise is simple enough to pitch, impossible to explain once you’ve seen it. Obie’s girlfriend Dorty breaks up with him at a diner after running for local government and presumably upgrading her life. In response, or perhaps in parallel, a creature called the Dance Freak begins appearing. He gets blamed for murders he didn’t commit. Everyone in town seems to hate him. The Salad Brothers force him to eat vegetables while accusing him of lying. His boss tears him apart over broken coffee mugs and his personality.
The film never quite settles on whether the Dance Freak is a virus, a monster, or just Obie’s own dysfunction externalized. But I lean towards the latter. Early reviews from big outlets, have decided Dance Freak is either a bit more complicated or that they simply didn’t see it through.
What’s interesting, for me, is how the film achieves a visual storyline on essentially nothing. The props are painfully basic. The sets are bare. The costumes barely hold together. Yet every frame reads as intentional.
Flies swarm Obie’s apartment. Dialogue becomes Peanuts-cartoon muted and nonsensical at times. Memories bleed into visions of past and future. The film operates on dream logic, familiar enough that you recognize the emotional beats, incomprehensible enough that you can’t predict what comes next. Mother of Movies decided It’s a breakup film that refuses to behave like one.
Robby Rackleff (director) plays Obie as a functioning addict who doesn’t know what’s happening to him, present but absent, moving through the world like someone watching it from underwater. Megan Koester’s Dorty is the fulcrum; she’s not a victim of this bizarre world, she’s its mirror. The film pivots from “man gets infected” to something far more interesting: two people recognizing their own dysfunction in each other.
The supporting cast, Stavros Halkias as the boss Megaman, Sarah Sherman as Salad Boy #2, Sheila Mears as the scientist Dr. Dilly Gorgul, all lean into the absurdist energy with the commitment of people who know exactly how strange this is and refuse to wink at the camera.
The “lab” sequence near the end is where the film’s argument becomes clearer. Dr. Dilly Gorgul is a scientist who claims to have created the Dance Freak. Central characters agree it must be killed. But here’s the thing: the sci-fi complication never does any real work. It’s set dressing. The scientist ends up more invested in Dorty’s approval than in explaining anything. Other players shrug off the mythology mid-sentence. The film isn’t interested in a coherent monster-origin story; it’s interested in the feeling of being humiliated, rejected, out of control and invisible. The Dance Freak isn’t a virus you catch, it’s what you become when nobody loves you. The vomiting worms bit reads like a literalization of that old childhood rhyme: nobody loves me, everybody hates me, think I’ll go eat worms. Except here, it’s rendered in grotesque, detail.
What makes this work is that Resnick and Rackleff revel in that weirdness, when it’s genuine, is just honesty wearing a different costume. The film seems to point to the face that ordinary dysfunction, being a loser, being humiliating to date, being someone people fawn over, doesn’t need genre elements layered on top of it to feel monstrous. It already is. The visual horror is just the emotional truth made visible.
There’s a scene where Obie chases Dorty through a dream. It’s tender and desperate and completely unmoored from reality. That’s the film in miniature: romance as nightmare, connection as collision, love as the thing that breaks you open and leaves you exposed.
By the end, when things begin to rebuild on broken foundations, it doesn’t feel like a cure. It feels like acceptance. Two people recognizing each other’s damage and choosing to dance anyway.
Verdict and Rating
Dance Freak is rated
3 out of 5 Fever Dreams
Weirdness as Heartbreak
Dance Freak is a breakup film wearing a monster suit. On a shoestring budget and three and a half years of crowdfunded determination, Resnick and Rackleff have made something visually magnetic and tonally unhinged, a film that looks expensive despite making zero narrative sense.
Streaming Options
Dance Freak streams on:
“A surreal, visually stunning mess that somehow makes perfect sense as a love story gone wrong.”
— Mother of Movies
Movies Like Dance Freak 2026
- Synecdoche, New York (2008) — A man’s personal collapse mirrors the collapse of his ambitious art project. Surreal, emotionally devastating.
- Toga (2023)— One of my fave indie filmmakers, Sean Rose looks into what happens when life gives you lemons.
- The Lobster (2015) — Absurdist logic applied to romantic desperation. Rules that make no sense but feel emotionally true.
- Sometimes I think About Dying (2023) — A film about why sometimes we are our own worst enemies.
- Hereditary (2018) — Family trauma rendered in horror-movie language. The monster is internal; the genre is the delivery system.
- I know Exactly How You Die (2026) — Fiction bleeding into reality where a writer’s thoughts become real while he obsessed about a woman from his past.
Dance Freak
Director: Robby Rackleff, Alan Resnick
Date Created: 2026-07-17 12:30
3.5
