Soul to Squeeze is the kind of movie that attempts to take itself too seriously. It’s desperately trying to be a meditation on trauma and self-discovery, but let’s call it what it is: a bargain bin David Lynch knockoff that crawls around in its own bullshit and hopes you call it a breakthrough.
The film follows Jacob, a young man who agrees to undergo a psychological treatment that merges his physical body with his subconscious. In order to receive this innovative procedure, he has to reside in a house lost to time—one that looks like if the Brady Bunch were crack addicts. Nothing is labeled, possibly because they couldn’t afford any name brands, and everything in the house is a relic from a different decade: a rotary phone, a picture tube TV, unlabeled cereal and milk. Is that supposed to mean something too?
After arriving at the house, Jacob receives a mysterious phone call about the experiences he’s going to encounter. The call makes no sense at the time, and spoiler: it’s from himself. The movie thinks that’s profound. It’s supposed to be his big moment—coming full circle. But by the time this reveal happens at the end of the movie, you probably won’t see it—because if you were smart, you already turned this movie off.
Everything that comes next in the movie is built on this concept of battling his inner demons—enter the mind, confront your trauma, come out the other side healed. But instead of delivering the audience anything coherent that makes any sense, Soul to Squeeze buries its audience in a nonstop barrage of WTF moments and at times just straight-up nonsense. Maybe this shit is supposed to mean something, but it plays like an inside joke from the director that we’re somehow supposed to decode—but guess what, no one’s laughing. And David Lynch you are not.
After going down the rabbit hole, Jacob meets an unconscious man who rambles about losing his dog. Then, without any explanation, we’re watching Jacob suddenly dressed like a dog, like some kind of dollar store furrie costume that looks like it was rejected from the show Wilfred. Maybe it means something. If it does, I have no clue what, and the film never tells us.
And that’s the ongoing problem with Soul to Squeeze—throughout its agonizingly slow runtime, it continuously throws scenes at you and expects you to understand them and think they’re deep, because they’re weird. It’s called art, you neanderthal, get it?
One of the next “this is supposed to mean something” moments is when we see Jacob taking a bath. Wait… is this dude trying to rip off Jacob’s Ladder? I mean, he did call his main character Jacob. Dude, stop ripping off better movies.
When we see Jacob in the tub, he suddenly finds himself under attack by a clump of hair in the tub. This hair wraps itself around his body and essentially fuses itself to him—everywhere except on his head. Maybe the director is trying to establish Jacob’s vanity, maybe even set up one of the film’s bigger threads later on—how much he really cares about being accepted by the people around him. Maybe this is the start of something. But if the film is trying to say something here, it’s saying it in a language nobody speaks.
This adventure through Jacob’s psyche is also laced with burping mermaids and this recurring theme of a pearl necklace. Where, just like with the hair, it feels like the film is once again trying to lay groundwork for something important, but never stops to clue you in.
Instead, all we get is random acts of insanity. Again—it’s called art. Clearly you’re too stupid to get that.
Not long after, Jacob is brought through a series of past memories by another character watching some broke-ass version of an old cartoon. But this trip down memory lane is the first scene to actually make any damn sense. It delivers a glimpse of innocence lost, and for the first time makes you feel anything for this character—a character who, up to this point, has been completely unrelatable.
While this scene looks like it appears to set something up, the filmmaker quickly backtracks on establishing any kind of momentum in its story, and instead introduces this concept that our protagonist needs rest—because apparently, you can sleep inside a dream.
But then the movie turns into a goddamn napping montage. With Jacob proceeding to spend his time between napping and working out, because push-ups cure your trauma.
Then, because this film feels like it’s eased off the crazy pedal for a little too long, it decides to throw what can only be described as a TV monster at you. A literal creature made of televisions shows up and explains the entirety of the plot of the film up to this point.
It reminds him that he has merely been coasting along in this reality, and that in order to get anything out of the treatment, he needs to take a deep dive inside himself—something that, up to this point, I guess he hasn’t been doing. And that the only way to go forward is to take his medicine. Quick—someone cue “Sound of Madness” from Shinedown.
Now I’m sorry, but if your story requires an in-world narrator halfway through the runtime to make sense of it, you didn’t create a masterpiece. It clearly proves what we knew all along: you have just been wasting everyone’s time.
From here, the film finally gives us what it’s been hinting at all along, this name that has been whispered throughout the film: Shirlene.
Now it’s spelled out clearly. She mattered to Jacob. He was supposed to be there for her. Then his friends showed up and mocked her, and he completely abandoned her, because bros before hoes. And because Jacob abandoned her by a lake, she drowned.
So this whole time this dude’s mental anguish has been nothing more than a guilt trip. Buddy’s feeling bad because he was a dick and abandoned a girl he liked because of his so-called friends. This isn’t profound, Jacob’s a d-bag and he deserves to feel like shit – it’s called consequences, Jacob.
Then of all things, after Jacob goes through more mental anguish, because why not pile on the crazy, he sees an echo of Shirlene inside himself, as we learn that if you know and spend so much time with someone, pieces of them eventually become a part of you. Wait, what.
Then Shirlene forgives him and allows him to let go of her and move on. Again—wait, what. No she didn’t. This is just Jacob really telling himself, “It’s okay that you were a piece of shit, bro. It’s all good.” So he forgives himself. This is the startling revelation. This is what I sat through over an hour to finally come to?
Then we get the grand emotional reveal. That phone call from the beginning? Again, it was Jacob. He called himself, and this is made to be some grand epiphany that he has finally learned something in his journey. But why is he calling himself? What’s the point of this? Is this like a time loop situation? Seriously, what the hell.
Then to end the film he wakes up in a garbage pile. Literally. Is this because Jacob is a garbage person and now he’s lifting himself up from the trash and can move on with his life? This movie and its symbolism. Use words—not something you learned in art class. You’re like that dude that filmed the plastic bag in American Beauty and called it art.
And then comes the final act of insanity. Throughout the film, there’s been this old-school educational video about the human eye playing in the background. It shows up at the beginning, we see Jacob watching it more than once, and then we get its full conclusion at the end of the film.
Now what’s this supposed to be? Another hidden message? Is this instructional video somehow the glue holding the whole movie together? Are we supposed to believe this is some deeper metaphor about the eyes being the window to the soul? What, that Jacob had to visually experience his pain and grief in order to truly be free? Just take Valium like the rest of us, Jacob, and keep going on with your life, burying your pain until it becomes a dull ache—it’s called living.
Soul to Squeeze is supposed to be about pain and facing your inner demons, but unlike the films it appears to try to pay homage to, it doesn’t leave behind a single thing worth feeling. There’s nothing profound here. You can try and baffle with bullshit and call it art, but at the end of the day, it’s still just bullshit.
It’s obvious the director watched Lynch and thought, “I can do that”. But Lynch doesn’t confuse the audience to hide the fact that he has nothing to say. His chaos is precise. It builds. It spirals into something that matters. He doesn’t just drop symbols into a blender and call it cinema. There’s method in the madness. Here, there’s just madness.
That filmstrip about the human eye? It’s not a metaphor. It’s not insight. It’s a thrift store prop waving its arms like it’s got something to say. And that’s the whole movie in one shot—stuff that looks smart, begging you not to ask what it actually means.
And if you’re dragging out a TV monster halfway through your runtime just to explain what the hell we’ve been watching—you clearly didn’t create anything profound, you created a mess and had to waste time explaining it.
You don’t get to slap trauma on the screen and call it art. You don’t get to pretend your madness means something. Being cryptic isn’t a vision. And noise isn’t a message. Confusion doesn’t equal craft, and being unpredictable doesn’t automatically make something deep.
Soul to Squeeze isn’t genre-breaking. It’s not misunderstood. It’s not experimental. It’s confusing, uninteresting, and a mess of a film.
