Midweek Mention... The Conspiracy

The Conspiracy (2012) Bad Dads Film Review

Sidey: Let's get going. What's going on with all the Arsenal players? Just having a lie down in the summer? They've all got injured at exactly the same time. This is your national team.

Reegs: I honestly don't give a shit about England. The only thing I really care about is Arsenal winning the league.

Cris: Are we recording? Okay. Is the conspiracy that all the Arsenal players are wankers?

Sidey: I think that's something that's demonstrably true. It's just a fact. Also, where is Pete? Is he still claiming to be busy?

Cris: He was skiing. He's back now. Back on Saturday afternoon. He promised I'll see him tomorrow, coming after smashing another PB at CrossFit.

Sidey: Right, we're going to rattle through this.

Reegs: So this week's film — The Conspiracy. A 2012 Canadian film written and directed by Christopher MacBride in his debut feature. It's got nobody you've ever heard of in it because it's a low-budget indie.

Sidey: I watched it. Did you watch it, Cris?

Cris: Yes.

Reegs: It starts with a Benjamin Disraeli quote: "The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes." And then it opens with your typical kook, screaming at skyscrapers about control through a megaphone.

Sidey: I thought it was a real documentary at this point! I quickly realized it wasn't, but the visuals at the start of the skyscrapers looked great.

Reegs: He's talking about overpopulation and the system of control. And it's structured entirely like a documentary. We meet Aaron and Jim, a couple of filmmakers who come across a viral video mocking this guy, Terrence, and they get drawn in by the comments. They go to see him.

Sidey: The stated intention of their documentary isn't about conspiracy theories themselves, but about the people who believe them.

Cris: Are you really a conspiracy theorist if you don't have a newspaper cutting wall?

Reegs: He doesn't just have a wall. He has the whole house covered in them. But he does have one particular area with everything connected by red string.

Dan: I should get one here. It would be nice to get some pins and red string and just connect things together.

Reegs: As Terrence says in the film: if you stare at anything for long enough, you'll find a pattern.

Sidey: There's a scene where Terrence is walking down the street wearing his news cuttings like a sandwich board, getting into arguments in the park about 9/11. The film is quite exploitative in a way, using actual footage of 9/11 and other real historical events to ground the fiction.

Reegs: But it intercuts this with genuine examples of what you would call a psy-op today. The Gulf of Tonkin, the Lusitania. It's interesting to put that real stuff in there to give credence to Terrence's mutterings. But then, suddenly, Terrence disappears. He just vanishes from the movie.

Dan: It's a shame, because he was the best character in it.

Reegs: His disappearance drags Aaron and Jim deeper in. Aaron takes all the newspaper cuttings from Terrence's flat and tries to reassemble them in his own apartment. He puts the timeline straight down the middle and gets completely sucked in.

Cris: It leads them to this group called the Tarsus Club. The Illuminati, the military-industrial complex, the Bilderberg Group.

Reegs: And they find an online article by a guy called Mark Tucker. He agrees to talk to them on camera, but only if his face and voice are distorted.

Sidey: Which becomes a theme for 90% of the people they interview for the rest of the film.

Dan: But he's got a massive ponytail and it looks like his fingers have been broken or mashed to pieces. Really bad arthritis or something. Very identifiable.

Reegs: Tucker leads them to a website for the Tarsus Club. They phone the number, and all it does is repeat Aaron's phone number back to him. Spooky.

Dan: They're caught in a trap. Aaron comes back to his apartment and it's been completely trashed. So he moves in with Jim.

Sidey: Which is a nice contrast. Jim's got a wife and a baby. He's got a lot more to lose. Aaron is a loner who was already fantasizing about living off the grid. The paranoia really takes over. It's no longer some fringe lunatic theory to them; they believe this organization exists and is tracking them.

Reegs: To cut a long story short, Mark Tucker says he can get them inside the next Tarsus Club meeting. So begins the final stretch of the movie. They get these really bad tie-clip hidden cameras and go undercover in the woods.

Cris: Through some shenanigans with body bags and hiding in bushes, they sneak into the meeting and mix amongst the elite "brothers."

Sidey: I was just thinking about the logistics of the gathering! They're crashing a highly secretive, elite dinner. Surely someone's checking the numbers? There'd be two extra seats at dinner! Two masks short for the initiation ceremony!

Reegs: Also, if this is the Illuminati, why are they meeting in a three-star hotel? It looks really cheap. But it's a low-budget film, so you excuse it.

Cris: During the ceremony, Jim is at the front of the queue and Aaron is at the back. Jim just repeats the script the guy in front of him says. But Aaron starts freaking out at the back.

Reegs: And then Mark Tucker walks in through the crowd. You see the ponytail. Aaron panics because he realizes Tucker set them up. He's given a knife for a "sacrificial hunt," looks in a mirror, and tries to do a runner.

Dan: Meanwhile, Jim hears a phone ringing. He opens a door and there's his wife and baby. He's abducted. Aaron is running through the forest away from a hundred guys in white robes and animal masks.

Sidey: The sound effects here baffled me. When Aaron gets caught, there's loads of stabbing sound effects. Stabby, stabby, stabby. But he's clearly not dead!

Reegs: It cuts to an interview with the CEO of the Tarsus Club, basically saying: yes, powerful people meet up. No, it's not a sinister blood ritual. We're just trying to create a new world order.

Sidey: Sounds pretty sinister to me!

Dan: But then we get Jim giving this unbelievable interview to the camera at the end. It's heavily implied they told him to lie to the camera so they wouldn't kill him and his family. He says Aaron just went off the grid to a commune, exactly like Terrence did.

Reegs: And Jim's wife is sitting next to him on the sofa, looking absolutely terrified. Fade to black.

Dan: I enjoyed the start of it. Terrence was a great character. As it went on, it got a little more ridiculous. The tie-clip cameras made it a bit too found-footage for me. A bit Blair Witch meets Eyes Wide Shut.

Sidey: It's quite breezy. About an hour and twenty minutes. I enjoyed it. I would have liked more focus on the psychology of why people get hooked into this stuff — what they're searching for — but as a thriller, it was alright. I spent a lot of time squinting because of the hidden camera gimmick and all the blurred faces, but it was decent.

Cris: I enjoyed it too. The acting was good considering I've never heard of these guys. I liked the sequence with the anonymous chat room avatars.

Reegs: I don't think it quite sticks the landing in the final third, but you can see what they were going for. And honestly, the idea that the whole world is being controlled by a shadowy elite who meet up for blood rituals is probably quite comforting to a lot of people, rather than accepting that the world is just chaotic.

Sidey: Strong recommend.

Cris: Yeah.

Reegs: Strong recommend.