By Peter Keough

Themes of class, race, and artistic appropriation reminiscent of “American Fiction” lurk beneath “Crumb Catcher”‘s generic conventions.

Crumb Catcher. Directed by Chris Skotchdopole. At the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema – Seaport and the suburbs.

A scene from Crumb Catcher. Photo: Music Box Films

At the beginning of Chris Skotchdopole’s deceptively smart, occasionally muddled debut feature Crumb Catcher, newlyweds Leah (Ella Rae Peck) and Shane (Rigo Garay) make fun of one of those kitschy, useless appliances typical of ill-considered matrimonial gifts. So it’s a kind of karmic twist that an even more useless, kitschy item threatens to prove their undoing.

Not that their marriage seems founded on solid ground to begin with. Cracks appear during the awkward wedding photo session when the barbed small talk reveals that Leah is Shane’s literary agent and is representing his first novel, an autobiographical exploitation of his Latino, alcoholic father’s checkered past. As a phone call from dad – taken by Shane out of earshot of Leah – reveals, the old man has been rewarded for his contribution to the couple’s success by not being invited to the nuptials. Leah apparently did not want to miff her well-to-do mother, who had sprung for the wedding expenses. Leah’s boss, the book’s publisher, also chipped in (compensating perhaps for the stingy $5,000 advance) by offering her vacation home in the New York boondocks for their honeymoon getaway.

Thus themes of class, race, and artistic appropriation reminiscent of American Fiction lurk beneath the generic conventions. A foreboding, uneasy tone, aided by sharp editing and images, draw one into the pair’s bouts of squabbling and cooing in Shane’s 1978 beater of a car (you know its unreliability — and the screwdriver used to start it –will factor in later on) en route to their love nest. It is, of course, the typical isolated spot soon to be prey to malevolent invaders as seen in films ranging from Funny Games (1997) to, well, Funny Games (2007).

The inevitable unwanted visitors soon arrive – the seemingly ineffectual but annoying John (John Speredakos, who looks unnervingly like another well-known, far more successful conman) and his wife Rose (Lorraine Farris, supplying nuance to the trashy femme fatale stereotype). John had been encountered earlier at the wedding reception. He was working as a waiter and has since tracked the couple down to their retreat, ostensibly to deliver the missing top tier of their wedding cake. In fact, though, mistakenly thinking that Shane is a rich writer and the pricey digs they are staying at belong to him, John hopes to interest him in investing in his invention, the item of the title. Together with his wife they put on a kind of PowerPoint demonstration of their ridiculous product (though it must be said no more ridiculous than many items boosted on The Shark Tank or in a Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue).

So why don’t the couple boot out the unwanted guests, it being well past bedtime on the first night of their honeymoon? Simple courtesy perhaps, since the strangers have ostensibly made a long trip on their own time to rectify an omission in their service. Nonetheless, such patience has limits. So Skotchdopole ups the ante and provides the invaders with some extra leverage. But is it even necessary?

Shane could have given the pair additional time of day because he found them sympathetic. He and John actually have things in common. Both come from the despised proletariat but have pretensions to higher status. As John imperiously insists, he is not just a mere waiter. He is also an artist like Shane himself and, like him, the son of a salt of the earth immigrant. He is also a kind of revolutionary. In the Crumb Catcher brochure, parts of which are a somewhat garbled manifesto, John writes, “The death of the middle class is a disgrace to this great nation, a nation of working-class heroes! We will bring the fight to the table! Pick up the brush and take matters into your own hands!”

But John mistakes Shane for a member of the privileged elite whom they both resent. And Shane sees John — as does the audience, perhaps reluctantly — as the generic malefactor who must be defeated in as horrible a manner as possible. So, instead of a sly undermining of genre conventions, with an added subversive skewering of class consciousness, Crumb Catcher settles into becoming your standard, perhaps overlong, nasty thriller, one whose violent machinations could have been resolved sooner by a timely call to 911.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).