“Let’s look at this empathy machine we’ve got,” Kallia (Artemis Shaw) says to her infant son Niko (real-life son Niko Kamalakanthan) in “Removal of the Eye,” unboxing a camera and praying that Roger Ebert was right about what it can achieve. Ten years of working on her thesis has been upended by two things – the birth of Niko, by way of her partner Ram (Prashanth Kamalakanthan), who is known to disappear into their closet that he’s turned into a makeshift recording studio for his rap music and unable to hear their son’s cries, and a mention by her friend and fellow grad student Tayarisha (Tayarisha Poe) that their program is looking for visual ethnography as opposed to a paper to submit, meaning her piles of notes about the use of Pagan ritual in Greek mythology should be converted into video content. It’d be difficult not to feel any sympathy to Kaila’s unfortunate position, but she’s not going to find any around her despite having moved into her apartment to live closer to her parents, who live just a floor below and drive her mad with their increasing needs.
In real life, the camera actually did give “Removal of the Eye”’s co-directors and stars Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan some comfort during the pandemic when they made “New Strains,” slipping into the roles of the harried Kallia and Ram for the first time and the anxieties of how to conduct themselves in lockdown reduced them to infantile behavior just when they were adjusting to being adults with a sudden sense of responsibility. Even though their follow-up isn’t a direct sequel (or at least the first doesn’t need to be seen to enjoy the second), it is understandable why they put on the personas again when it is amusing to see Kallia and Ram take care of a child without having grown up much themselves, opening with a scene in which Ram is upset that Niko is sleeping with Kallia in their bed, taking up his spot to sleep after he can’t be bothered to calm him down from crying. For all the baby’s tears, he seems to be the happiest in the household when his lack of sleep and an aversion to breastfeeding have put his parents on edge and rather than get helpful practical advice from her mother downstairs, Kallia is urged to perform an exorcism when her mom believes an evil eye has been cast on their family, encouraged further by a seemingly freak accident that puts her father in the hospital (caused by the olive oil crock her mom keeps in her shower).
The energy around Kallia and Ram may not be great, but Shaw and Kamalakanthan give off good vibes throughout as reasonable solutions may elude the new parents, but the realization sets in that they’ll have to figure things out for themselves. When that’s the case, there’s something especially endearing about watching the filmmakers working out a unique visual language of their own to accentuate the manic experience Kallia and Ram endure, introducing the film by flailing the camera around to make a mundane apartment appear otherworldly and give credence to Kaila’s mother’s ideas, but it hardly seems arbitrary when serving a second purpose when it can also make the couple look like they’re barely treading water. The later use of a fisheye lens also has multiple implications, acting as newborn Niko’s view of the world, the 360° camera that Kallia struggles to properly deploy for her thesis project, and Ram’s dream of making it into a Beastie Boys-style music video, and such formal chicanery might come across as a low-budget stunt in less gifted hands, yet in a comedy where the concerns could feel familiar, it’s shrewd never to let anything become too comfortable. Will Epstein’s eclectic score, bursting with a mix of impish clarinets and keyboard thumps, ties the whole thing together as frazzled nerves that somehow are all connected to one another.
As stifling as the air would seem to be in Kallia and Ram’s apartment, the limited setting has really opened up a world of possibilities for Shaw and Kamalakanthan to explore the stresses of modern life, giving the environment as much character as anyone living in it as a home becomes a place of endless distractions from what’s really important. That any parent survives the first year after giving birth is treated as triumph enough to pin an entire movie on, and the fresh and funny “Removal of the Eye” convinces that it’s a hero’s journey no different than any other in a grand tradition of films where an emotional connection can make the unnatural comprehensible, whether in a galaxy far, far away or an apartment building in New York.
“Removal of the Eye” will screen at the New Orleans Film Fest on October 20th at 6:30 pm at Canal Place 1 and October 21st at 5:45 pm at Canal Place 2. It is also available virtually through October 27th.