The Internet is an impossible object: at once all-consuming and totally insignificant, both the closest to and furthest from reality, its head and its ass one and the same. As it follows, capturing it on film, as Peter Vack’s www.RachelOrmont.com tries, is a cryptid hunt.
We might get lucky with one accurately depicted limb of the beast: a thread of instant messages in an odd dialect, a character with their brain scrambled stupid by gore vids and shooter manifestos, a meme that won’t mean anything to anyone in six months. It’s this difficulty that has kept the online world in the far background of 21st century film, treated as less consequential, less integrated, less real than real life. The nonstop flow of messages between characters– likely doubling or tripling the amount of face-to-face interactions they share– is sidelined to superimposed text over shots of the IRL (“In Real Life”).
Stalking an ex on Instagram and privately seething is as psycho is as close Netflix is willing to imagine the online world outside of a true crime doc. Despite the amount of beleagured parents who’ve likely had to learn the word “groyper” this year, the kind of online life so consumptive that it feeds on your offline one is still waiting for a cartographer; a proper entry into the canon.
Peter Vack Talks About RachelOrmont
The wait may be over with www.RachelOrmont.com (hereafter RachelOrmont), a filthy and absurd midnight movie determined to fry brains and flip stomachs; a film so terminally online that even the milder scenes would, as the kids say, “kill a Victorian child“. The second feature-length effort from NYC’s Peter Vack following his 2017 debut Assholes (a grossout “romance” about addiction and anal fetish staring the director’s sister and parents), RachelOrmont is a provocation of a different breed: one that dares the squeamish to reckon with the schizoid darkness happening on cellphones all around them; and for those already part of its world to feel the vice grip they’re in.
RachelOrmont follows the titular Rachel (Betsey Brown), sold as an infant to an ad agency which uses the first 31 years of her life in a tightly controlled facility to focus-group Mommy 6.0, a technicolor pop star played by HBO series Euphoria’s Chloe Cherry. Rachel feels a cosmic draw to Mommy, the message of her “music” speaking directly to her soul– but Mommy is Rachel’s actual mommy, astroturfed into celebrity by the same company that bought her baby.
Soon, Rachel’s obsession spirals out of control and her erratic behavior forces the agency to put her on duties “better suited to her temperament”: live product testing for sex toys, content creation, and playing an adopted daughter for an Internet-famous couple with an even more Internet-famous daughter. Oh, and everything we see at the agency is set on stage in front of a live audience meant to represent a comments section, several scenes are subtitled in Impact font, and Rachel talks like a baby for the entire film. If that sounds insane, or maybe even terrible, I’m underselling it.
By doing away with the business of the offline world almost entirely, Peter Vack comes closer to capturing the bizarre, paranoid, vulgar and tender Online World than anyone has dared to attempt. RachelOrmont is a postmodern freakout bursting at the seams with the grisly viscera of the Internet: AI-generated besties, swastikas, drone bombing, Ahegao face, “bruh”, tradcath e-girls, stockholm syndrome, and unsimulated sex that culminates in what can only be described as a total jizzfest.
As RachelOrmont is set to begin a ten-city run with Alamo Drafthouse, we talked with the director about striking the balance between shock and soul, his sister’s arresting and anchoring lead performance, and the challenges of making a film about a world that could change beyond recognition overnight.
Still courtesy of Fast Rainbow Films
Peter Vack on the Online World’s Criticism
I was surprised when I heard RachelOrmont was going to be shown for the first time in Chicago, because the Alamo out here is like a very normie frat guy theater because it shares a block with Wrigley Field. So the thought of some of those people stumbling in and seeing this really brings me a lot of joy. The only other option for people in Chicago that night is Robert Zemeckis’ 1985 sci-fi, Back to the Future.
I think they might like it! We’ve had some walk-ins off the street who really enjoyed the film. There were some guys in their 50s and they were not tapped in at all. We talked about it for three hours. They were mystified, but they read the language almost like [Stanley Kubrick’s] A Clockwork Orange; dystopian sci-fi slang.
RachelOrmont is billed as a traditional dystopian sci-fi and I think that’s the right way to come at it. It seems that some of the early negative reactions are from those who can’t see this movie for what it is, because they’re seeing too much of themselves in it.
I’ll admit to the fact that I read the Letterboxd feedback and one recurring complaint is, “Peter Vack thought he could get around the criticism of this movie by including the criticism in the movie.” But it’s such an overidentification to consider that, because they think they’re being depicted literally just because they recognize some of the content.
It’s a self-flattering reading to think, “This is a movie about me and my online friends.”
Well, that’s what we all think these days. Every movie I see is randomly about me. [Paul Thomas Anderson’s] One Battle After Another. It was about me.
RachelOrmont as the first film I’ve seen that renders the experience of being online in a physical space that characters are really moving through. There’s this cold distance between the world on the computer and the “real world” in most post-Internet media, but Rachel essentially lives online for so much of this movie. Everyone is acting insane, but that’s really how people act online.
Depicting online content as staged performance—with comments voiced by a live audience—was something I experimented with in a 2014 short, Send. Back then, I was an outsider to internet culture, reading theory books about it. Then I became an insider, and that shift shows up in RachelOrmont.
To some, that’s when the movie really finds its identity; for others, that’s when it loses them. But that’s interesting.
A friend said that the film deals with cringe aesthetics: what it means to be cringe online. Cringe travels fast; there are cringe curators, compilations, everything. I don’t cringe much myself, but it can be fascinating—it’s like watching the gap between how someone sees themselves and what they’re actually doing. She thought the comment section in the movie was deeply cringe because you’re hearing people say what they’d normally only type. That crossing of taboo makes it uncanny.
These days, I’m more interested in what people tell me about the movie than my own insights. It’s about things you’re not supposed to see, and language you’re not supposed to hear spoken aloud.
Uncanniness runs through the whole film—no one talks like a real human, but they’re all deadly serious. The crowd scenes are full of blank, stoic faces; people blurt personal confessions or lash out in bizarre ways. It’s every kind of projection you see in real comment sections.
Totally. All the stuff I’ve seen in comment sections on my meme pages–although I’m like a retired meme admin right now– you’d get sincere outrage, performative outrage, total nonsense. If a comment section had heat, someone would show up to live-journal.
Exactly. Online users sense that people are there, so they unload.
Right. Someone once asked what I’d have done with a bigger budget, and I joked maybe I’d make the comments their own stage that could be commented on in turn. [laughs] But honestly, the movie already does that: everyone’s attention keeps shifting around the crowd. I’m glad we didn’t have the money for some high-tech version that would’ve ruined it.
The “Real World” of the Inner World of the Internet
How did you draft the script for RachelOrmont? You said the first draft was from 2014, which was a completely different era of the internet. How did you keep the story current, and how do you hope the filme will age?
The only way to keep up was to rewrite constantly. I did probably 50 or 60 drafts over the years. I did a major overhaul to it in 2021 because so much had changed, then kept rewriting through production.
As for aging: I don’t know. It’s a period piece about the recent past. Personally, I like movies that are dated. “Timelessness” often feels fake to me. I’d rather be honest about a moment than pretend it could exist anywhere.
With some of the meme references, some people won’t relate at all, and that’s fine. It’ll just seem esoteric to them. My editor, Brad Turner, was skeptical at first. He asked why we’d use such niche references, and I said, “Wouldn’t you in a book?” Then he got on board and started enjoying the story, even if he didn’t understand half of it at the start.
There’s a Letterboxd review ranking near the top that calls RachelOrmont “fascistic art with the foremost intention of creating an in-group and an out-group. You’re either here to get points for saying ‘retard’ in public or you’re the enemy.”
I’m not interested in engaging with that as serious criticism. It’s clearly written by someone determined to hate the movie. But I found it baffling. The movie feels to me like it’s about alienation and numbness; about how violently uncool and disconnected Rachel is in a world she can’t fully grasp.
I love that reading, and thank you for saying it. When I read a review like that, I wonder what movie that person saw. They missed Rachel’s story completely—or maybe over-identified with her. The only person who could see an “in-group/out-group” message in this film is someone already thinking that way. It’s ironic that so many viewers “out” themselves as the “in-group”.
Right. It’s almost like resentment: “I understand this more than I want to, and that makes me mad.”
Focusing only on that, they miss the heart of RachelOrmont, which is Betsy’s story. Rachel is traumatized by everything she sees online. She’s impossibly pure and good, and she’s encountering all this brain rot. To call that fascistic seems… closed-hearted.
Still, I don’t want to take the fun away from people. If someone writes a six-paragraph takedown, I think, go off. That’s part of the experience. If my movie gives you that much to say, then you’re engaging with it, and that’s a win.
Betsey sent me a quote from Catherine Breillat that I love: “I want the audience to come out of my movies profoundly disturbed and profoundly happy.”
That’s it. I love roller coasters, extreme experiences that throw you around emotionally. Even hate-watching can be its own form of delight.
That person had sooo much fun writing that post.
You can picture them drafting: “I’m going to say fascistic art—that’ll get so many likes.” In that moment, they become Darci [Dasha Nekrasova], the Dasha character. It’s its own kind of trolling. I get it. They feel trolled, so they troll back. That’s the spirit of the movie.
Peter Vack Doesn’t Make / Makes Shock Cinema
Speaking of extremeness, let’s talk about the hardcore pornography in RachelOrmont. It’s the one part of the film I’ve had the hardest time connecting with. I maybe even resisting a little.
Obviously, Rachel plays with provocation and midnight-movie energy, but do you see it as a shock film? If not, what was your thought process around including those scenes and how they might affect audiences?
The pornography feels truthful to me. That’s a part of the Darci character’s show, that’s part of her content. If she were a real pson, she would absolutely be clipping real porn and posting it. Censoring that would’ve felt dishonest.
On a deeper level, we also built counter-narratives into those scenes. We show a couple fighting about porn; Rachel is visibly disturbed by it.
Honestly, a formative experience for me was finding internet pornography too young and being completely traumatized by it. So yeah, there’s an autobiographical current there, something about early overexposure and shame. Not including that would’ve felt like lying about the experience.
That makes sense. This leads into one of my favorite parts of the film: the transition from the online world to the outside world, when Rachel gets literally thrown out the door. We’ve just watched 45 minutes of her suffering, and as soon as she’s out, she’s pounding on the door to get back in.
There’s a line of people waiting to enter this world, like it’s a club. Months pass and she never adjusts. She sleeps in a box, pisses in the tunnels, and still wants the agency’s approval. I keep thinking about those people standing in line in the movie. Why would anyone want that life?
Maybe the spectacle is the draw. Being part of that environment feels exciting.
We log in every day, knowing that part of the online world is bad for us. I’ve been on Twitter [X] for ten years. If they kicked me off my account it’d be like chopping off an arm.
If you’ve been on Twitter for ten years, you are Rachel. That’s why Betsey’s performance is so fucking incredible. She really is the emotional anchor of the whole thing. She sells every second. It’s almost an impossible part to sell. But she just is that good.
What’s fascinating is how much innocence and confusion she carries into those scenes, the sweetness of seeing something shocking for the first time. By RachelOrmont‘s, when she meets her idol, that realization really feels like it’s taken 100 years of living in the machine.
Exactly. She gets one moment of redemption—some agency—but it’s too little, too late. It’s kind of a feel-bad movie, ultimately.
I watched your Internet Is Dead interview on YouTube. The interviewers talked about how the first viewing of RachelOrmont. can feel tragic and hard to watch, while the second reveals more humor. That’s how it felt for me too. The first time, it’s upsetting; the second, you can appreciate the absurdity.
Even so, the vibrator-testing scene destroyed me. It’s brutal.
Yeah, it’s a painful one. Betsey makes it excruciating.
It’s brutal but has humor in it too. It’s so dark it circles back to funny. What do you think about balancing tragedy with the ridiculous?
Honestly, it’s instinctual. The “green room” scenes came alive because of Betsy’s commitment. Tey were fucked-up ideas on paper, but her performance made them heartbreaking and funny. That’s the magic of performance; the page can’t carry that emotional power.
On set, I don’t intellectualize balance. I just chase whatever feels true and alive in the moment, and trust the edit to find equilibrium. Sometimes I even told actors, “Drop character. Don’t even be the character, this take.” I wanted tonal ruptures, shifts that kept it unpredictable.
Betsey, though, her tone stayed consistent. That’s what grounds the film.
Speaking of tone, her baby voice maybe the hardest thing to get past. It happens so early that viewers have to recalibrate, like, “Is she really going to talk like this the whole time?” It’s risky, but it works. How did that choice come about?
During preproduction, I texted Betsey, “I think Rachel has a voice.” [laughs]
She used to talk to her dog, Francine, in that exact tone. It resonated in her body in a self-soothing way. She thought, “If I were alone, this would calm me.” It made perfect sense for Rachel. She’s isolated, infantilized, talking to herself and her computer like they’re pets. So when Betsey started using it, I said, “Yes, that’s it.”
I think people find it cringe because of the internet associations; it’s the dialect of cringe comps now.
Exactly. But it feels truthful. These micro-dialects pop up constantly online. Where do they come from? Algorithms. Mimicry. For Rachel, that voice is both her comfort and her captivity; it’s the way she connects and self-soothes.
Then there’s Dasha’s character (Dasha Nekrasova of Red Scare Podcast), Darci. She’s kind of the evil twin of Rachel: charismatic, performative, a self-aware manipulator. She really nails that tone. It’s both grotesque and magnetic. Like, you hate her yet you want to keep listening to her.
That character existed in 2014 way before I met Dasha or knew who Dasha was, and I was trying to place myself in the future, to think of an archetype in the future. It sounds like I’m making this up, but this person who was like – “edgelord” wasn’t really a word at the time – but you know, based e-girl who gets clout from humiliating people and being provocative. It was already there online, and I thought, “Well, this will only accelerate.”
Dasha provokes a lot of extreme feelings on both sides, so when I read comments from people who hated the movie like, “This movie was all about Dasha,” I’m thinking, “Well, I’m glad you’re so obsessed with her that you think that.” I think they’d be shocked to know that all the in-jokes about her persona came at the end. Or maybe they wouldn’t be shocked and think I’m just that sloppy and impulsive, and they’d be right! [laughs]
I just watched Assholes for the first time, and I was surprised by what an emotional movie RachelOrmont is. There’s a similar shock sensibility in Assholes, but there’s a really profound heart of tragedy in RachelOrmont that feels very John Waters; the chaos is controlled in a different way.
Shock cinema is never even what I wanted to do, but I think it’s what I’ve done here. It really was just a different writing process. I think I’m always rebelling against my ideas somehow, like I have some desire to build something up and tear it down. I think it sometimes comes from a self-critical place, but working from that place can become really beautiful, or funny, or relatable. Ideally, even healing.
I won’t go so far as to say Assholes heals people. I know it’s hurt some. But I don’t know! Maybe it healed a couple, too.