The Show Must Go… Mad
Lou Diamond Phillips isn't just in Max Tzannes' Et Tu—he's drowning in it. The trailer opens with Brent (Phillips), a theater director stewing in his own failure, watching his Julius Caesar adaptation flop night after night. His wife might be sleeping with the lead actor. The audience is sparse. The script? A disaster. Then enters Malcolm McDowell's janitor, a man who's “been mopping the stage for a very long time” and offers a Macbeth-adjacent solution: Get bloody.
Tzannes' debut feature (premiered at 2023 Heartland Film Festival, finally hitting theaters July 25, 2025) isn't just a comedy—it's a love letter to the agony of artistic mediocrity. The trailer's tone swings between farce and menace, like Noises Off meets Theatre of Blood. Phillips, eyes twitching with repressed rage, delivers the kind of performance that suggests he's either method-acting a breakdown or genuinely exorcising decades of Hollywood frustration. McDowell, meanwhile, leans into his signature brand of eerie charm, wielding a mop like a scepter.
Why This One?
Indie comedies about theater implosions aren't new, but Et Tu stands out for its lethal absurdity. The janitor-as-deus-ex-machina is a brilliant twist—imagine Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead if the side characters were actively scheming against the protagonist. And Tzannes, who followed this with the meta-found-footage flick Found Footage: Patterson Project, clearly has a taste for genre-bending chaos.
The film's delayed release (shot in 2022, shelved until now) feels oddly fitting for a story about artistic purgatory. As Brent snarls, “For the good of the theater…” you can almost hear Tzannes laughing from the editing room.
The Verdict
Will Et Tu be a masterpiece? Unlikely. But it's the kind of messy, ambitious indie that reminds us why we root for underdogs. Phillips and McDowell chewing scenery in a crumbling theater? That's cinema. And if the janitor's solution involves actual stabbings—well, et tu, Brent?
