One day. Two strangers. One lousy debtor.
That’s the setup for Or Something, a slice-of-life film that strands Amir (Kareem Rahma) and Olivia (Mary Neely) together when Teddy (Brandon Wardell), a total dillbung with more IOUs than charm, owes them each over a grand of cold hard cash. What starts as a mutual annoyance becomes a tether. Externally, they’re stuck wild-goose chasing these funds. Internally, they’re circling the bigger, hungrier questions: who dares to love, who knows how to and what does it cost to say yes.
Popcorn: The Surface Pleasures
Sirens, abused horns, wet pavement, loud, angsty, skeptical, glorious: New York does its usual background song. We meet Olivia first with a tote full of boosted clothes and a consignment hustle that flops. She walks up to Teddy’s, our resident jackass, and is followed by Amir. Teddy points them toward Uptown Mike, played by the one and only David Zayas (Dexter). Amir and Olivia wander the city, chasing cash and maybe connection.
On paper, it’s electric. Two people in a city of millions, forced to bump up against each other’s post-Tinder era philosophies on the opposite sex in the span of a single afternoon. The locations are usual– subways, diners, sidewalks, Central Park– but they’re intended to be the stage for something extraordinary: a man and a woman pushing and pulling at the myths and wounds that define modern intimacy.
Pyres: The Fire Beneath
Here’s the quiet secret the film circles without having to name it: the scariest man isn’t the one who competes with a bear in the woods. It’s the one who true-loves like a balm in your embrace.
A man like Amir, with his curiosity and compassion, casts away the combativeness required for these modern-day gender battles, disarms her feminist shield, and exposes the inner secret all women hide. Not whether she can love or whether she’s good enough, but rather if she’s even capable of recognizing and/or receiving tenderness. That’s the deeper opportunity at play, the soul-deep current the movie brushes but never lets consume it. If it had, Or Something might have transcended its subway banter and become something bracing, even converting.
But the flicker never quite catches into flame.
The Dual Arc: Ache vs. Armor
Much of its struggle stems from its untranslatability. What works on Subway Takes—quick, ninety-second repartee—isn’t enough to sustain a talkie, 83-minute feature. Here, it renders its Seinfeldian style superficial. The dialogue doesn’t dance; it plods. Every exchange feels like a lay-up, one character setting the line so the other can dunk it.
Yet, Something remains watchable.
The notion of fernweh— that wild ache for somewhere else, for something more, someplace you’ve never been– is the emotional marrow the film needs for its narrative skeleton. It isn’t just wanderlust. It’s a spiritual condition. A stirring toward possibility, self-expansion and the poetic mystery of elsewhere.
In a narrative, a concept like fernweh can act as the emotional engine. It can power character motivation, deepen thematic resonance and elevate a story from anecdotal to archetypal. When treated as the heart, fernweh frames a character’s movement not just as plot but as pilgrimage. It draws the audience into a collective ache—to reach, to become, to dissolve the border between who we are and who we might be.
Instead of allowing fernweh to be its heart, Or Something treats it as its spleen: essential, but ultimately expendable.
The Misses
Amir is the film’s draw and its flaw. The character is empathetic to those around him. He’s smart, pensive, still in his listening. Appropriate for Rahma who is this flick’s star.
Olivia, by contrast, rejects empathy and turns every encounter into a skirmish simply because he’s a dude. The gender battlegrounds bleed through every line– his weighted, hers weak and the imbalance of Rahma being the star and Amir being such a sympathetic character while Olivia brickwalls her way through the day keeps the film from sparking. This lopsidedness robs Something of its inherent tension. The script speaks through Amir and favors his ache over Olivia’s armor—and the friction fizzles because of it.
Popcorn + Pyres Judgment
Still, there’s a pulse.
Zayas enters too late in the movie, but he comes out swinging, wielding that gentle grit and penetrating gaze he’s known for. He sparks life just when Something threatens us with flatlines.
Or Something captures lightning in a bottle but cracks the jar before the storm hits. While its premise is magnetic and its protagonist compelling, it ultimately offers a promise it never fully keeps.
The beauty of slice-of-life storytelling is that it doesn’t tie itself in neat bows. You get one day. That’s it. And at the end of this day, one walks away changed. The other does not. One says yes to possibility. The other gives it the New York City pigeon.