Justin Benson is a full-service filmmaker. Not only did the 39-year-old San Diego native write, co-direct/produce (along with Aaron Moorhead) and star in the film Something in the Dirt, but he volunteered his actual apartment as a filming location for the project. In the age of COVID, it kept him close to home.

Benson laughs. “When all this stuff happened, people said to us, ‘Why don’t you go make a film in quarantine, since you are so do-it-yourself?’” Moorhead and Benson’s first film, Resolution, was structured with two guys basically sitting in a cabin. The idea that their next film would consist of two guys basically sitting in an apartment sent warning flags up their creative flagpole. Rising to the challenge, they found an artistic way to expand the story out from a chamber piece to become a love letter to the city of Los Angeles.

“Because so many things were shut down and because everything was so empty,” he continues during their Sundance press conference, “we had the whole city to use creatively to give the movie some scope. And then another couple of the weird things that happen is, it changes the performances when the crew is so small. It’s easier to get to a somewhat more emotionally raw place when it’s just you and two of your friends basically. And by the way, when I say it was us three, that is correct for the most part.”

The film opens as we meet Levi (Benson), who has snagged a no-lease apartment sight unseen in the Hollywood Hills to crash at while he ties up loose ends for his exit from Los Angeles. He quickly strikes up a rapport with his new neighbor John (Moorhead), the two soon swapping stories like old friends under the glowing, smoke-filled skies of the city. One day, Levi and John witness something impossible in one of their apartments. Terrified at first, they quickly realize that this could change their lives and give them a purpose. With dollar signs in their eyes, these two random dudes will attempt to prove the supernatural.

Part of the supernatural phenomenon that occurs in the film is explained with detailed mathematical quotients, but Benson issues a warning not to attempt to follow them too closely.

“If a mathematician watches this movie, it’s going to be their nightmare,” he admits. “There is a lot of fake math in the film.” A pre-med student before he was a filmmaker, Benson reveals that all the calculus and physics classes had imparted just enough knowledge for him to tell the story. “People can follow it if they don’t know any of those things. And there’s some truth for it – like, there is a variable for gravity. But it’s also like,” he laughs, “I have a bad memory.”

Even though the film is basically a two-hander with just Benson and Moorhead, it initially had a running time hovering close to three-and-a-half hours, and many of the special effects were so rudimentary, that the levitation of a couch was depicted simply by two guys lifting the couch.

“This is what speaks to Sundance’s ability for lateral thinking,” notes Moorhead. “Sundance was able to see through all that ridiculousness into what it became today.”