As fans of Mac DeMarco’s genial and open-hearted music (not to mention the Weezer cover he played for us), we’re always on the lookout for new projects involving the multifaceted oddball. But this one still came as a bit of a surprise: Stereogum reports the musician is appearing in Dark Prism, a micro-budget indie that looks low on coherence but high on inscrutability. He’ll be playing someone called “The Master,” and if the trailer is any indication, the role mainly involves him reading a monologue straight to camera. It also seems to indicate that sitting through this film might be absolutely excruciating, just judging by the student-film-meets-friends-making-a-movie vibe it gives off, though we’d love to be proven wrong.
The movie is described as being “about three unique and strange women, each battling their own demons, in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Although they exist in different times and perhaps different worlds, their lives will soon collide due to the mysterious appearance of a massive prism.” The presence of Lloyd Kaufman in the trailer gives a pretty good indicator of the Troma-like nature of this thing, meaning maybe DeMarco will just be a narrator, à la Lemmy in Tromeo And Juliet. (It also all starts to make more sense when you realize the director, Dylan Greenberg, is an 18-year-old employee at Troma.) Either way, here’s hoping this is a springboard for DeMarco to leap into mega-budget action blockbusters, as we’d love to see him fighting, say, Transformers, armed only with a jaunty art-pop composition.