The low-key loser delights of Eephus, Cloud, and Vulcanizadora

The Chicago International Film Festival never slouches. As a local and the humble film editor of The A.V. Club, it’s one of the premiere cultural events of the year. But its 2024 edition—its 60th, screening over 120 features—highlights something that always makes the fest special. Featuring a plethora of films we’ve already reviewed at The A.V. Club like Blitz, The Brutalist, Conclave, Hard Truths, Nickel Boys, Pavements, A Real Pain, Maria, and The Room Next Door as well as dozens more from around the world, CIFF balances the hot-button movies that’ll be haunting the year-end lists of critics while truly feeling international. This isn’t just where you’ll find the new film from Andrea Arnold or the latest Robert Zemeckis. Those are present, of course, but flanked by tiny films from Finland, Iran, Palestine, and Zambia, as well as a half-dozen from the fest’s home city. In the spirit of these scrappy little movies from places so often skated over when the world looks for the next great film, is Eephus, a movie about amateur baseball in small-town Massachusetts.

Eephus, the debut from filmmaker Carson Lund, is an elegy for a hobby and for a certain kind of male relationship. Two teams, Adler’s Paint in red and the Riverdogs in blue, while away the hours on a brisk autumn day in the 1990s, playing America’s pastime for the last time. Soldiers Field is about to face a burial that only a bunch of beer-crushing middle-aged guys would deem ignoble: It’ll soon be bricked over for a new school. The ballplayers bitch and moan because the next closest field is half an hour away, in a town everybody hates, which means that this game might be the last time these guys suit up together.

Afternoon drifts into evening over a condensed yet leisurely 90 minutes, with members of both teams—filled with regular-looking character actors, fat, busted, gravelly, or on the way to one or more—bonding over shit talk and shit shooting. They’re not bums per se, but none seem to have anything better to do. Conversations, natural and ephemeral, are interrupted by the crack of the bat. Their connections, so certain yet so fragile, only truly existing when the gloves are on and the umps are out, are as winning as the other details being phased out of this little town. Like the community’s triangular manhole covers slowly being replaced by standard-issue circles, these men and these unspokenly close bonds will fade away soon enough.

Shot by Greg Tango, the crisp compositions mostly stay confined to the diamond, though those sitting on the outskirts or in the dugout get their due. A god-like scorekeeper meticulously tallies the facts and figures, tracking with imperfect detail a game that couldn’t matter less. Some sarcastic skater teens heckle from beyond the fence. An old-timer creaks on the bleachers, waiting for everyone else to catch up with him. Eephus’ oddball title comes from a slowpoke trick pitch (Red Sox long-timer and eephus aficionado Bill “Spaceman” Lee pops up to sling a few) that drifts through the air, confounding the batter with its unexpected leisure. As the film follows suit, captivating with its poetic details, you’ll understand that Moneyball line: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”

For a solid stretch of Vulcanizadora, its title remains as mystifying as Eephus, even if you speak the Spanish necessary to separate it from its protagonists’ rusted-metalhead aesthetic. For the two people marching through the Michigan woods (who both fit into the category “boys over 40”), “Vulcanizadora” seems less like it refers to an actual tire shop and more like it was a random word the pair thought looked cool when they wrote it in the death-metal font of the film’s title card. And even when this haze is lifted and clarity sets in, you don’t feel satisfied. You feel like writer-director Joel Potrykus wants you to feel: Amused, wistful, and stuck mulling over his movie’s Beckettian mix of absurdity and futility.

As Potrykus’ unromantic Midwestern losers mature, so too does his filmmaking. But Vulcanizadora still feels like a natural progression of his slime-slacker milieu: At the movie’s heart, there’s still a ridiculous and upsetting idea, thrust upon desperate members of the lower-middle class, seen through to its tragicomic conclusion. And yet, it’s far more subtle in its images and emotions than the allegorical stuckness of Relaxer or the monstrous swindler of Buzzard, both of which also star Joshua Burge in various states of unravelment.

Here, Burge plays one half of a camping-trip friendship that marches towards a grim fate. Vulcanizadora is a silly and bold movie, and one that frames traditional institutions (ranging from family units to the police) as more horrific than stabilizing. But now a mellow resignation weighs down its man-children, grounding their fully committed idiocy. The only thing you can really count on is that things end. It’s a terrible comfort, but one that Potrykus’ fringe-dwellers cling to with age.

Things inevitably crashing down around you—the divine law of fucking around and subsequently finding out—powers writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud. One of three new movies this year from the Cure and Pulse filmmaker, Cloud clearly divides itself in half. In the first section, Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) scams and swindles online buyers as a reseller, flipping fakes and finding profit where he can. His life occurs in Kurosawa’s Kafka-like gray office dystopia, moving through warehouses and shipping docks. People resent him, or tolerate him only with ulterior motives, like his reselling peers and his clearly gold-digging girlfriend (Kotone Furukawa). It’s a desperate, unsettling life that revolves around the flashing “Sold” marker lighting up an eBay-like screen.

But on the other side of that “Sold” is the buyer. They are the people who drive the two-hour film to its more kinetic second half, pushing a creeping look at a fringe online capitalist into the flesh-and-blood real world. The physical consequences of making money off of faceless usernames on a bidding site crash down around Yoshii in ways both silly and startling, leading to a stand-off that’s never quite as satisfying as Kurosawa’s slow-burn intro. But as the dust settles, it’s hard to see another path forward for those the filmmaker highlights—those trying to carve out a livelihood in this increasingly lonesome world, and those trying to persist without being eaten alive.