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Before Curry Barker wrote and directed the year’s biggest surprise smash Obsession, he was known primarily as a sketch comedian collaborating with his friend Cooper Tomlinson, and starting to dip into horror with shorts distributed through their YouTube channel. Eventually Barker built up to making the feature film Milk & Serial, a 62-minute horror movie made with an extremely low budget. (The reported figure is $800, covering the price of a camcorder and hiring some actors.) Barker and Tomlinson hoped to secure some form of broader distribution, but after pursuing that goal for over a year, they ultimately decided to release the movie for free on their YouTube channel. Their loss is your gain: The movie is still streaming (albeit with semi-frequent ad breaks) on the “that’s a bad idea” channel. It’s available to watch online for free. But what exactly is this movie, and is it worth an hour of your time?
What Is Milk & Serial About?
Unlike Obsession, which attempts to situate itself in something resembling a real-world socioeconomic reality (even if it sometimes feels a little murky in terms of how old the characters are, what their incomes are, etc.), Milk & Serial is very much enmeshed in the world of YouTube. Marshall (Curry Barker), nicknamed “Milk,” has a YouTube channel called Prank Bros. with his roommate Steven (Cooper Tomlinson), nicknamed “Seven.” Many of their pranks appear to target each other, and the movie opens with Seven pranking Milk on the latter’s birthday. Seven pretends to invite a guy Milk doesn’t know to Milk’s birthday party; he’s actually hired an actor to pull a gun filled with blanks and pretend to kill one of their friends (outfitted with a squib, a blood-spatter mechanism often used in action and horror movies).
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But as the movie goes on, we see Milk has been at work on a similarly minded prank of his own — which reveals darker depths than the best friends’ joshing dynamic originally hinted at. Soon the line between potentially viral pranks and potentially deadly twists becomes nonexistent.
What Has Curry Barker Said About Milk & Serial?
Milk & Serial‘s narrative crosses the line from bro antics to genuine horror, and Barker has said that working in comedy actually prepared him well for that transition. Both genres involve “studying the human condition,” he told Rotten Tomatoes around the release of Obsession, and understanding characters’ psychology. (They both also involve some sense of surprise or visceral reaction from the audience.) Still, in that same interview, he’s humble about the online success of Milk & Serial, saying he thought of it as a “hobby project,” and one that he never expected to pop up on Variety’s 2024 list of best horror movies, alongside the eventually Oscar-nominated likes of The Substance and Nosferatu. “Not only did it not feel like a real movie to me,” he noted, “it felt like an old movie” because of the long gap between finishing the film and actually posting it online.
So Is Milk & Serial Worth Watching?
One of the most interesting aspects of Obsession is that for the most part, it doesn’t feel like a YouTuber clumsily making his way through a feature film the way, say, last year’s Shelby Oaks does. Barker’s achievement is all the more impressive given that Milk & Serial, to be honest, does play a lot like a YouTuber attempting to teach himself how to make a real movie. Like Shelby Oaks, it adopts the popular found-footage framework, but even more like that movie, doesn’t seem to particularly understand it. Mostly, it’s an excuse for the filmmakers to shoot the whole thing, well, like a YouTube video: handheld camera, sometimes directly addressing the audience, jaggedly “realistic” cuts — much of which actually undermines the movie’s conceit that we’re looking at footage shot on the fly, given that a lot of it appears to have been edited in a very YouTube-friendly style, and even at some points includes musical score. There are even different points of view cut together. Did everyone collab on a final version after all the carnage?
That’s nitpicky, and of course plenty of other found-footage movies have fudged the boundaries of that format before. There’s certainly an appealing “twistiness” to Milk & Serial, and as with Obsession, Barker has a keen eye for the twisted justifications concocted by normal-presenting male minds. But when Milk — whose nickname seemingly exists just to set up the movie’s laborious title pun — explains to the audience that gaslighting is when when you prank someone and blame them for it, it’s hard to tell whether the movie is satirizing his definition, mansplaining the concept of gaslighting, or earnestly attempting to put it in an online-prankster context. Is this movie… a little dumb?
What it’s definitely not is particularly tense. Although Barker apparently cut more than 15 minutes out of it to make it a better fit for YouTube once he decided to go that route, this movie drags. There was a little bit of that point-belaboring in Obsession, too, but that movie had engaging performances and creepy imagery to back it up. This one has all of the dithering of Barker’s later movie, but with (understandably) amateurish acting from the filmmakers and a lot of dull, under-lit compositions. At times, the movie might as well be a podcast.
Of course, even Barker doesn’t seem sure about whether to “count” Milk & Serial as his directorial debut. With an abbreviated runtime and a direct-to-YouTube release, it’s only a little bigger in scope than any number of shorts that appear on the service. It’s also, as mentioned, streaming for free, so it’s a pretty low commitment for Obsession fans to check it out. At very least, they should walk away from it impressed by the leaps and bounds Barker has made in the years since.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
