A Psychedelic journey to the centre of the self.
Soul To Squeeze doesn’t so much open as pin you down and restrain you while it drips feeds into your psyche. W M Weikart’s fractured descent into the subconscious makes it clear early on that the film isn’t interested in comforting its audience – or its protagonist, and it’s not here to explain itself. It’s here to press and probe its fingers into the soft spots of memory and keep them there.
Jacob (Michael Thomas Santos) volunteers for a new form of therapy that promises to physically merge him with his subconscious, an idea that sounds ludicrous until the film’s eerie conviction makes it feel irresistible. This treatment is pitched as a shortcut, condensing a lifetime of introspection into a single weekend, and that compression gives the film a queasy urgency. As hallucinations bleed into reality – a gassy mermaid, an eyeball-studded television monster, a game show host grinning like he knows the punchline is you – Soul To Squeeze keeps its narrative just barely tangible, but never less than intriguing. It’s less about plot mechanics than the churn of atmosphere, and it wields its surreal imagery with a precision that teeters between hypnotic and oppressive. Even its title, borrowed from the Red Hot Chili Peppers song, feels apt: a nod to the same knot of melancholy and yearning that drives Jacob’s internal struggle.
Santos anchors the chaos with a performance that feels startlingly unguarded – jittery, raw yet oddly sanguine in its fear. Danielle Meyer’s Shirlene drifts through the film with the half-presence of a memory given form, unsettlingly real but never quite tangible, while Greg Baldwin’s Unconscious Man and Ken Belsky’s too-cheerful Game Show Host function like archetypes clawed out of a Jungian nightmare. They populate a house that feels like it was built out of familiar furniture rearranged just enough to unsettle you, each one embodying fragments of Jacob’s fractured self pressing him toward buried truths.
Weikart’s direction places him somewhere in the lineage of low-budget cerebral stylists like Shane Carruth or Jennifer Reeder, filmmakers who trade narrative clarity for emotional architecture, building spaces that feel at once alien and oddly recognisable. There’s even a faint echo of The Cell in the way the film visualises internal trauma with tactile, grotesque images, though Soul To Squeeze is stripped of that film’s glossy excess, replacing it with something bleaker and more intimate. The aesthetic choices – the boxed-in opening ratio and bold, block colour – create a vivid, almost theatrical visual language that still aligns with the unsettling, introspective tone seen in films like The Eternal Daughter or Saint Maud, even as its palette feels far more striking.
Sound design becomes its own form of intrusion: creaks, hisses and the low, guttural hum of something unseen, each threaded so tightly into the film’s fabric that silence feels suspicious. Pierce Cook’s cinematography matches it beat for beat, turning even static spaces into sites of slow dread. When the film does occasionally tip into outright grotesquerie, it feels less like a departure than a culmination of what’s been gnawing away in the background.
Its pacing won’t gratify the impatient, especially in the opening stretch, and its refusal to spell out its metaphors may strike some as alienating, but that friction is the point. This isn’t therapy as epiphany, it’s psychoanalysis as endurance, a reckoning with the quiet, internal battles we wage to avoid what we can’t bear to face: the way we avoid and distort what we can’t bear to face until there’s nowhere left to run. Its ending offers no grand release, just a muted recalibration: Jacob’s breakthrough is less victory than survival, a recognition that even small steps towards expanding our perception can feel monumental when dredged from the mire.
Soul To Squeeze won’t be for everyone, but in the fractured, dream-logic tradition of indie psychodrama, it plants itself with uncommon assurance. It’s maybe a film to be absorbed rather than decoded, unsettling in ways that can stick around long after the credits fade to black and for a chamber piece built on little more than one man and his nightmares, it carries a surprising weight.
Soul To Squeeze is available to view on Amazon Prime.
