“The Trouble with Tessa” is the Analog Horror Series You’ve Been Looking For
In the best of circumstances, there is something unsettling about a small, insular town. Even something like Gilmore Girls’ Stars Hollow, that’s supposed to be whimsical and eternally fall, has an air of something sinister. People just weren’t meant to exist where everyone knows everyone else. Where there are rules, written and unwritten, about how to conduct oneself within the city limits. Plenty of horror movies and TV series have set themselves in a small town. One could argue that much of Stephen King’s bibliography fits the bill of creepy, too-provencial towns with supernatural forces at work. In The Trouble with Tessa, the small town in question is Lowery. Through its six-episode run, the truth about this odd little town will come to light.
Tessa (Katrin Nugent) has made the choice that many before them have made: run away from the big city to the reprieve of a little town up north. The reason for this move is mainly because Tessa’s job as a documentarian landed them in hot water when they exposed the secrets of a big-name politician. To escape the fallout, Tessa hightails it to Lowery, where they’ve paid the rent on a nice big house for themselves. They’ve sold their camera equipment and effectively hung up their documentarian hat. That doesn’t last for long, though, because they come across a box of video and cassette tapes from the person who lived in the house before them. In one of the tapes, Tessa hears what they think sounds like a woman being murdered. They can’t help but start digging into the idyllic town’s past, but Tessa isn’t prepared for the secrets of Lowery to come to light.
courtesy of The Trouble with Tessa
The Trouble with Tessa isn’t strictly a found footage series, but it incorporates aspects of the genre into its narrative style. The series is best described as an analog thriller that will certainly scratch the itch for those who relish looking into the grainy corners of videotape footage for clues to solve the mystery at hand. There’s something inherently more uneasy about using older filmmaking tools because of the haziness and the fact that film cameras and camcorders used to be a definitive source of proof. If you caught something with one of these tools, it meant that whatever you experienced was real. The Trouble with Tessa’s use of videotapes, microfiche, and pocket tape recorders isn’t just a fun throwback. It’s the characters’ means of trying to parse the truth. If they can capture the strange goings-on with their analog tools, they can get a grasp on the world around them that feels harder to understand by the minute.
courtesy of The Trouble with Tessa
Much of The Trouble with Tessa takes place within Tessa’s rental home, with only Tessa there. It’s not exactly a solo chamber piece, as neighbors come and go and Tessa frequents the one bar in town, but much of the series rests on the shoulders of Nugent as Tessa. The series marks their debut lead role, but they come across wholly at ease as the captain of this shift. We get to see them enthused at the idea of a new project, drunk on cupcake-tasting wine, and scared shitless. One of Nugent’s frequent scene partners is Maria Wolf, who plays Betsy, the too-nice nextdoor neighbor. Betsy is the sort of character horror aficionados will love. Wolf plays Betsy as nasty, but coats her with a mountain of sugar. The smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes, her ability to always show up at the worst moment, and her insistence on following the Lowery rules all make the viewer immediately wary of Betsy. Watching Tessa and Betsy go toe-to-toe is one of the finest points of the series.
The Trouble with Tessa is proudly scrappy filmmaking on a self-described shoestring budget, but you can’t really tell when watching the series. The story is smartly plotted over the course of six episodes, long enough to feel like a substantial series and short enough for there to be no filler episodes. The payoff of Lowery’s mystery is frightening and bloody, with effects that look just as good, if not better, than movies whose catering budgets couldn’t even be described as shoestring. Each episode runs around 25 minutes, which makes the entirety of The Trouble with Tessa about 2.5 hours, an easy binge watch for those looking to get into the spirit of the spooky season. The Trouble with Tessa is a psychological, small-town nightmare of a series, sure to keep you tuned in until the very end.
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