"Poser" a guileful, haunting debut
Poser (2022) It can be a rare treat to discover a film that begins one way, introducing you to a subculture you could only pretend to know anything about, and then goes another way that still feels of a piece. With the cool indie “Poser,” directors Ori Negev and Noah Dixon make their guileful feature debut, basing it on what they know: the Columbus, Ohio music scene. From there, Dixon’s script makes a subtle tonal shift, beginning as an intimate, offbeat character piece that darkens and slowly becomes a more troubling psychodrama about delusion and finding one’s true identity in a small world of lo-fi artists. Like a less-crazed, more soft-spoken, but still increasingly vampiric second cousin to Aubrey Plaza’s Ingrid from 2017’s “Ingrid Goes West,” Lennon Gates (Sylvie Mix) is a wallflower trying to make her way into the underground music scene in Columbus. Outside of working as a catering dishwasher, Lennon wants to “embrace the unconventional” and records ambient sounds digitally an
