CHATTANOOGA FILM FESTIVAL 2025: Four Evil Deeds (2024)

Directed and written by Richard Peter Hunter, this is , quite simply, a movie about people being bad. Six people give in to their impulses; this can happen no matter your station in life, whether you’re an ex-con trying to get back to a normal life outside of jail or a rich lawyer in a dead marriage.

Shot on digital video, this feels like life being captured, even if the way the screen fades to black instead of a resolution may frustrate some. My issue with it was that the BDSM was used as an indicator of weirdness or sin; yes, it’s someone cheating on their life and at odds with what they preach, but the desires of this lifestyle aren’t inherently wrong. This came off as a vanilla judgement.

It’s exclusively men behaving badly here, from a dry cleaner who misreads signals and touches a co-worker to a minister obsessed with dead mice, a stray cat and pornography. Some of these evil deeds may just be mistakes. Others are sins. I wonder if we’re complicit for judging between them.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.