Jacob Elordi is everywhere now, if you’ve somehow managed to not notice right up until the point of reading these words. Since being plucked from the doldrums of teen pop television to star in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla it seemed like, if Elordi could match or outshine Austin Butler’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of the King just one year prior, he could say au revoir to the instant dopamine rush of Euphoria and move on to “real” art. If the buzz around him leading up to, prior, and since the release of Priscilla has been any indication, Elordi is certainly moving farther up the Hollywood food chain—but Priscilla was just one of four films starring Elordi in 2023 alone. The 26-year-old has two more features that have entered post-production, one of which will see the young actor go toe-to-toe with Richard Gere in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada. Elordi is well on his way from HBO heartthrob to doing hand-to-hand combat with Timothée Chalamet in the A24 offices (although, admittedly, Chalamet has seemingly all but left that life behind).
It’s funny, then, that among the buzz of names like Schrader, Coppola, Emerald Fennell and (for the more keyed-in cinephiles) Sean Price Williams, Elordi managed to squeeze in a made-for-Tribeca indie that is being dumped on VOD following a very limited theatrical release. (As of writing this, I can still only find one theater in Coney Island playing it, and that’s in all of New York City.) Not as pop cultural as Priscilla, arthouse cool as The Sweet East or as made-for-TikTok virality as Saltburn, He Went That Way is the last of Elordi’s 2023 flicks to release. And for good reason.
Cinematographer and music video director Jeffrey Darling’s feature debut, He Went That Way partly adapts Conrad Hilberry’s novel Luke Karamazov, which was itself based on the real-life, serial-killing Ranes brothers who killed a combined total of 10 people during the 1960s. Specifically, He Went That Way adapts the account of Dave Pitts, an animal trainer who once picked up a young, hitchhiking Larry Lee Ranes, while traveling cross-country with his famous chimpanzee, Spanky. As the credits roll, a brief interview with Pitts plays as he’s sat next to various Spanky memorabilia (I had no idea prior to this that Spanky was a real television monkey). It lasts all of maybe two minutes, and I desperately wished that, instead, He Went That Way was a 30-minute documentary recounting Pitts’ experience.
Surely a short film interview would have been more interesting, and engaging, than He Went That Way. It’s the kind of story that’s undeniably fascinating, but so bare-bones as a screenplay that it needs a little something more if it’s going to work, padded out either in the director’s style or in the writer’s script. A little more artistic liberty, a little more self-indulgence from a director (Darling) or screenwriter (Evan M. Wiener) with a little more to say. As it stands, He Went That Way merely gets the Pitts analogue, Jim (Zachary Quinto), and the Ranes analogue, Bobby (Elordi), from point A to a bewildering, deflating point B, frequently bordering on the psychosexual but never committing to the bit.
While getting his car serviced not far from Death Valley, Jim picks up a clearly erratic Bobby, stuck there looking to hitch after his own car broke down completely. Jim pities Bobby—a dishonorably discharged soldier, for reasons unknown but easy to guess—like the caged animal in his van that he cares for. But Bobby displays a personality that makes any outburst Jim has suffered at the hands of Spanky look tame. Jim is en route to a “private engagement” arranged for Spanky in Illinois and agrees, bewilderingly, to chauffeur Bobby part-way on his journey to win his girl back in Michigan. But while stopping to rest at a hotel in New Mexico, Bobby’s hair-trigger temper and eccentricities are revealed for what they really are: Sociopathy. Bobby reveals a handgun and demands Jim’s wallet. The hitchhiking ride suddenly becomes a hostage situation.
The Bobby-Jim dynamic ultimately teeters into Stockholm syndrome territory, although I guess what else is there to do on a road trip with a murderous, volatile, six-foot-five tree than attempt some semblance of camaraderie. They bond while preening together before hitting up a dance hall in Oklahoma, where Bobby is eager to talk to women, or so he says. This leads to the single most unnerving scene in He Went That Way, after the men take two underage girls back to their motel room. It’s a conflicting sequence, equal parts salacious, upsetting and impossibly tense, made gratifying by the way it delicately balances all three and the way Elordi acts it all out.
There should be more of that, but He Went That Way never transcends straightforward road-trip drama with a surface-level allegory. Other than that motel scene, Elordi gives what is easily his worst performance out of all four of his 2023 films. The Australian sports a Midwestern accent same as Quinto, but one which is often barely intelligible as her slurs and mumbles his way through conversation. Yet the sheer capriciousness of his performance and of his character’s mood is still relatively unsettling—Elordi plays the villain, in whatever morally gray iteration that may be, extremely well. Quinto is adequate as his counterpart, nervous, insecure and consistently at-odds with himself; he’s clearly portraying a straight man with some level of repression and unconscious desire. But as that murky dynamic isn’t explored meaningfully, the trajectory of their relationship becomes stale. And of course, we have Spanky, who, in our post-Nope world, is portrayed by Phoenix Notary in a suitable-enough monkey mask if you don’t look at it too long. Notary is also most likely—based on filmography and last name—the child of known ape-portrayer Terry Notary in, apparently, a commitment to creating a kind of family brand.
All in all, I think it’s good—necessary, even—for Jacob Elordi’s budding film career to have at least one forgettable Tribeca Festival indie stinker in his filmography (what else is the Tribeca Film Festival for, really?) to give it a little bit of character. At the very least, it’s nice to see how Elordi is evidently open to trying all kinds of things, both big and small, to see what sticks, discover his niche and, above all, maybe even avoid the trappings of franchise fame. Elordi is a promising star with a good agent (he spoke in an interview recently about how he doesn’t yet choose his roles) and he needs to whiff every once in a while on his Hollywood journey. Even a year from now, no one is going to remember He Went That Way, but many years from now they are definitely going to remember Jacob Elordi.
Director: Jeff Darling
Writer: Evan M. Wiener
Starring: Jacob Elordi, Zachary Quinto, Patrick J. Adams
Release Date: January 5, 2024
Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.