Rotterdam 2025 Review: Joseph Kahn's ICK Puts the Fear in Aging

Joseph Kahn always had his pulse on the zeitgeist. No, scrap that, he made the zeitgeist what it is. If you look at his music videos in the late nineties and early aughts, he together with Dave Meyers, Hype Williams, McG and Sophie Muller basically designed the look of that era. Films like Detention and Bodied had loftier goals: Detention thoroughly deconstructed the teenage mindset where everything feels like the end of the world, and skewered incel culture at the same time. Bodied asked questions about cultural sensitivity surrounding language, e.g. cancel culture, but had a lot of fun with it. Now Ick, his new monster movie does something else entirely: it examinates the character of a once-promising person asking themselves if they are a has-been. In the same breath Joseph Kahn barges on toxic nostalgia, and a world gone mad while everybody acts like it hasn't.

In his typically frantic and fast paced style, with his patent expert eye for blocking, Ick is about a guy losing grip of a world passing him by. It feels like Kahn uses this film to interrogate his own feelings about aging. In the character of Hank he has a likable everyman who keeps clinging to his past. If Detention was an exaggeration of the teenage mindset, and Bodied skewered college kids, Ick lovingly mocks aging millennials.

This is a film about a guy who doesn't get what the world has become. Negative reviews of Ick singling out a Gen Z character who speaks in social justice terminology as a misguided comment on "woke culture" miss the point. This is a film partly about the feeling that you can't connect with the rest of the world anymore, especially the newer generations. That the "narrator", in this case the character of Hank through which we enter the film, might not be entirely reliable is the point. This film is not only about the feeling the world has gone mad, but also an admittance you might be out of touch. Kahn is not so much building on the zeitgeist as he is calling himself "an old".

That the point is easy to miss is kind of built into the story. The film is about an oozy plant life called "the Ick" taking over the world while everyone ignores it. The Ick has almost laughably multi-purpose qualities, reviving the dead, zombifying the living and many more surprises. The multi-purpose quality extends to its satirical intentions. Sometimes Kahn bites off more than he can chew, having his metaphor extend to the Trump-administration, the rise of misinformation, alcoholism, social media, toxic nostalgia, std's, covid. Whatever you name it, it is in there. But I can't fault its ambition. Kahn made two of my all time favorite comedies, and many all time favorite music videos. And while Ick never reaches those heights, a has-been he ain't. This is a madcap thrill ride of a movie; hilarious, heartfelt and at times gleefully gory. There is a lot of gas in the tank left, even if the fear of aging looms as a specter over the film.