Parents of the modern generation find themselves with unique challenges compared to prior ones, particularly due to a shift in perspective which acknowledges children as people and not as accessories. This means recognizing their needs and emotions, helping to position them into the kinds of well-regulated adults that past generations only thought they had created. For storytellers, this is fertile ground for a harvest as generational trauma is ripe for deconstruction and exploration. This is where actor/writer/director Erik Bloomquist (Long Lost; Founder’s Day) begins with his latest project, Self-Help, a darkly comedic horror having its world premiere during Chattanooga Film Festival 2025. Fascinatingly, Self-Help is, to a significant degree, predictable in its character trajectory yet it manages to stick its overall intention regarding generational differences and how the so-called “selfish generation” may be the ones to finally destroy the perpetual cycle of familial trauma.
L-R: Landry Bender as Olivia and Madison Lintz as Sophie in SELF-HELP. Photo courtesy of Mainframe Pictures.
College student Olivia (Landry Bender) is not looking forward to her upcoming trip to see her estranged mother Rebecca (Amy Hargreaves) and is glad to have her best friend Sophie (Madison Lintz) going along with her. She hasn’t seen her mother since freshman year drop-off, shortly after her father died, and so tension is high. What Olivia couldn’t predict is that, upon arrival at the weekend destination, she wouldn’t be greeted by her mother, but by several masked individuals sitting in chairs, awaiting a tv on a rolling station to begin playing. Its message: a promise of truth and healing from a messianic individual. Suddenly, potential reconciliation is the furthest thing from Olivia’s mind as this potential family weekend is revealed to be something potentially sinister and it’s going to require Olivia to dig deep to survive.
Jake Weber (center/white robes) as Curtis Clark in SELF-HELP. Photo courtesy of Mainframe Pictures.
Unlike Bloomquist’s thriller Long Lost or slasher Founder’s Day, Self-Help merges genres, selecting pieces of each to incorporate into a narrative. This means that a sequence can be set up to be deeply disturbing one second and turn into a joke in another, harvesting laughs from the sheer tonal switch caused by characters reacting in an unexpected way to heightened situations. This frequently works in service of the film, helping to convincingly portray this surreal experience that Olivia is thrust into. It also allows for smart character work where exposition would be far more hooky. A fabulous example of this is when Olivia and Sophie are going to miss their flight and Sophie asserts herself to the airline desk clerk to ensure they make it. In a moment of sheer horrifying realism, Sophie (a White girl) whips out her phone to record the clerk (a Black man) and makes up something he said, thereby weaponizing generations of racism in the form of White tears against a dude just trying to do his job. By this point in the film, we’ve seen enough of Sophie played against Olivia to know she already possesses a strength of character and backs up her friend, but this is a step into violent rhetoric that shows us a bit more about who Sophie is, setting up an unease toward the character that we might not have felt before. In the horror genre, trust is a luxury few can afford and, with this one scene, Bloomquist and co-writer Carson Bloomquist (Founder’s Day; She Came from the Woods) has created a doubt that will linger until proven otherwise.
Landry Bender as Olivia in SELF-HELP. Photo courtesy of Mainframe Pictures.
What’s particularly intriguing about the film is the setup and execution. Is this weekend adventure the start of admittance into a cult? Is it a form of aggressive alt-therapy? Is it a trap set by an estranged mother desperate to reconnect; a trap that only Olivia can either fall for or avoid? The group’s leader, Curtis Clark (Jake Weber), doesn’t like his picture taken, responding aggressively when it happens, and seems to pursue questionable objectives, but then he claims he’s not a cult leader by stating, “cult leaders want people to stay, I want people to leave,” thereby challenging preconceptions about what is actually going on. The truth is simple and best left for audience discovery, but it has an intriguing impact. If a horror film is often a metaphor for some unknown, unrealized, or ignored trauma, then this entire narrative is about forcing Olivia (often too easily manipulated by those she acknowledges shouldn’t hold sway with her (like a feckless beau)) to confront the parts of herself that have been hiding in her shadows, pushed down deep within herself as avoidance in what seemed like self-preservation. Thus, a question arises about whether extreme therapies that push the bounds of morals and ethics are inherently wrong or if the ends justify the means when the only way to heal is to force one to help their own self. Horror and comedy overlap in the ways that pain can be terrible and funny, yet one finds themself realizing that there’s a nugget of truth buried in here.
Jake Weber as Curtis Clark in SELF-HELP. Photo courtesy of Mainframe Pictures.
The prominent issue, however, is that the narrative can be traced for what it is very early on. From the prologue that sets up the foundational trauma to the ways in which Curtis and Rebecca respond to Olivia and her concerns, there’s not much in the way of mystery or uncertainty. This leaves the audience, more often than not, waiting for the unexpected, and it’s too infrequent to maintain tension or interest. It’s only when the narrative creates space for fellow retreat guests Owen, Andy, and Joanne (Erik Bloomquist, Blaque Fowler, and Carol Cadby, respectively), that the line between dark comedy and psychological horror finds definition and it is all the better for it. Are these people victims of a grifter? Are they cult members? Or something else entirely? What is that they want and, if they are true believers, how do they respond to the intense treatment Curtis employs? There is a terrible tragedy festering under the surface of Self-Help that speaks to the ways in which the most vulnerable of us are made most susceptible to nefarious forces, closing them off further instead of creating opportunities for healing and growth. This, of course, is a matter of perspective because there are some elements to Curtis’s methods, extreme as they are, that make a certain amount of sense, at least within the scope of challenging individuals to face their traumas, to strip away the layers of bullshit acting as armor. What leaks through, between the elevated tension from the supporting cast (of which Erik plays a particularly poignant part) and the confrontation between Rebecca and Olivia, does present a startlingly modern perspective that children don’t owe their parents anything and parents owe their children everything.
Landry Bender as Olivia in SELF-HELP. Photo courtesy of Mainframe Pictures.
This shouldn’t be such a revelation, especially given the boom of child psychology in the late 1970s/early 1980s, but children are people with emotions and needs. They don’t ask to be brought into this world, so it falls to the parents to provide. In an ideal world, children would be given roots and wings, a place to call home and return to in times of strife, and support to explore the world. Yet, there are parents who cling too tightly to children, who place unnecessary expectations, view them as accessories for a lifestyle they are born into, or, worse, resent them for wanting to take flight. When Erik and Carson Bloomquist tackle all of this head-on, Self-Help has proper promise and results in a few satisfying surprises that make up for the shots we see called well before the characters do.
Screened during Chattanooga Film Festival 2025.
In select theaters October 31st, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Chattanooga Film Festival Self-Help webpage.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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