"All art is dangerous," famously said Rene Russo's gallerist, Rhodora, to Jake Gyllenhaal's art critic, Jake Gyllenhaal's Morf Vandewalt, in the much-criticized art world satire, Velvet Buzzsaw.
Seven years later, this would've made a convincing slogan for Turn It Up!, the feature debut of Canadian director Sam Scott, as this is its core throughline, repeated in one scene almost verbatim, with the only caveat being that this time it's centered specifically around music.
AC (Justine Nelson) is the exhausted leader of an indie rock band. We catch up with them while they're in the middle of the worst tour in history, according to the band's guitarist, Berg (Jonathan Craig), an asshole whom AC hates, but can't really get rid of, since their other guitar player and AC's longtime crush, Court (Gwenlyn Cumyn), might be on her way out, since she has a stable day job. The band's drummer and sometimes sound engineer, Russ (Xavier Lopez), is mostly cool with everyone, except that he also believes that something's gotta give, and soon.
It actually does, after the band performs at a sketchy location with no audience, where they seem to tap into some kind of an inspiration mine and come up with a new melody. This novel music puts them and anyone who hears it into a weird trance, prompting the arrival of a powerful manager, Miss Vee (Liv Collins), who likes their sound so much that she doesn't seem to be deterred, even when the audience's heads start literally exploding.
Turn It Up! is certainly a commendable effort on its authors' part. It's a neat, fun concept, clearly executed on a minimal budget, but with an abundance of creativity and obvious love of sci-fi splatter comedies of the past. With its glimpses into another dimension, exploding heads, a Canadian version of the Men in Black, and Twin Peaks references, it sounds like a contender for the best cinematic experience, making it really hard to formulate why most of it doesn't land as well as it could have.
In a nutshell, for all of its wonderful kookiness, Turn It Up! could've benefitted from being even crazier, turning it all up even more. As it is, the film comes off as a sort of compromise, where the authors choose to wink knowingly at the audience, instead of truly blowing anyone's mind. The aforementioned ideas about art don't really help the situation with the very surface-level analogies; honestly, for all the hate it got at the time, Velvet Buzzsaw at least had some interesting ideas about the relationship between art, its creators, and viewers.
Turn It Up! does have its moments. For one, genre icon Julian Richings steps out of darkness at some point, with his trademark reserved creepiness, and that can never be a bad thing. For two, Kris Siddiqi, who plays one of the secret agents, carries the deadpan irony of the film on his shoulders, while Jonathan Craig has a lot of fun playing an obnoxious attention whore, and Justine Nelson and Gwendlyn Cumyn are convincing in their mutual pining.
Somewhere in another dimension, all of this adds up to a truly fun film.
The film enjoyed its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. Visit the film's page at the official festival site for more information.