Calgary Underground 2026 Review: BAGWORM, Visually Excoriates Modern Masculine Isolation

A man should have his house in order.

 

Carroll’s house is most definitely not in order. He appears to be living in a burned out shell of a structure with the roof about to fall down on him.Seeing how nobody else in Bagworm acknowledges this fact, it is probably a metaphor. But it is a good one in a film that wears its images and ideas loudly on its dirty sleeve.

 

Carroll has issues with women. He is seen early in the film thoughtlessly speed-swiping right on Tinder. Later, he unpleasantly scolds the date that he does land for what she orders at the restaurant. He doctors photos of himself, violates privacy boundaries, and is a compulsive liar. He even steals his internet.

 

You might know a Carroll, the kind of antisocial man who rages against the machine while at the same time getting duped by scams, and is often oblivious to his own place or function in the world. He is terminally online, subsisting on microwave convenience food, and arguing about the Earth’s wobbling magnetic field in online forums. All the while, he is burning all bridges between IRL family and friends, and eschewing social norms.

 

Upon seeing a stranger in a fancy car dump half a bag of garbage onto the street, he fetches the bag, follows the vehicle home, waits until nightfall and dumps it back onto the offender’s property. Is this an act of civic justice, or merely retribution for retribution's sake, to establish a kind of righteous dominance?

 

When Carroll decides to finally, quite literally, ‘touch some grass’ outside of his 'house,' he steps on a rusty nail. Thus begins a downward spiral of madness, infection and body-horror suffering that director Oliver Bernsen wants to take to the absolute squirm-inducing limit. With no health care or social support network, chugging dark blue cough syrup is his way of combatting extreme tetanus. It is as disgusting-looking as it sounds.

 

For such a grotesque film and subject matter, the 16mm photography is often quite beautiful and strange. From the interiors of the home, where the eponymous bagworm is quite literally undergoing a metamorphosis inside the walls, to a climactic (but profoundly sad) Las Vegas drug fuelled blowout to celebrate the upcoming birth of his friend's first child, the film seems to get prettier as Carroll gets uglier.

 

Peter Falls is proudly game as the thoroughly unlikeable lead. He gets sweatier, facially bloated, and his eyes develop a red bloodshot colour, while his damp, matted hairline seems to retreat in real time. Unrelenting to the bitter end, with Vegas as a stand-in for a hellish pupa or chrysalis. For a sizeable part of the film, Carroll is wearing a Paradise Lost T-shirt, and for good reason: He comes face to face with the moral consequences of disobedience by way of his blossoming infection.

Bernsen makes good use of the Snorricam. This is strap-on camera rig that keeps focus on the actor's upper body while the background moves. Some might recall it from Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, a film that is Bagworm’s even angrier uncle at Thanksgiving.

 

The unspoken challenge of the filmmaking here is to present Carroll in such an unambiguous light that the audience achieves maximum loathing, only to come out the other side. One cannot look away while he finishes his journey through the lake of fire, and beyond. Not so much to learn or forgive the darker corners of the broken male, or evolve past this, but to observe and relish the demise. This is not a forgiving kind of movie.

 

There is a curious aside along the way, however. Shortly after the nail incident, Carroll loses his job (selling hammers to hardware stores, with not bit of irony, it is that kind of movie), and beings to rot (figuratively at this point) doing Uber as a last resort.

 

A very minor traffic incident ends in a stand-off with an older man who dresses him down (repeat after me “I will do better. I will be better. I will change”). The man literally takes the clothes off his back in an act of masculine domination. That the man is played by the director’s father, ubiquitous character actor Corbin Bersen (TV's L.A. Law, Major League, Disorganized Crime) makes this so much stranger. The film takes a brief detour to follow the elder Bernsen to his beachside home, which, expensive and tasteful, is just as empty as Carroll’s turgid existence. In a film that registers in the key of maximalism, this quiet aside excoriates the notion of dominance for dominance sake.

 

Having one’s house in order may not be so literal after all. 



 

The film screened at the 2026 Calgary Underground Film Festival. 

[Nerdy Postscript: Stay for the closing credits, done with an unusual typographical effect.]