Fried Barry

• The feature grew out of Kruger's 2017 short of the same name, a roughly three-minute experimental piece shot in a single day. It got Barry stumbling through a warehouse on heroin, and it cleaned up on the festival circuit: 59 official festival selections and 13 awards before Kruger ever thought about expanding it into a feature.
• Lead Gary Green wasn't a trained actor. Born in Cape Town in 1964, he'd spent decades working as a stuntman and as an extra in non-speaking background roles across local and international productions. Fried Barry was his breakout. Kruger built the whole feature around him and kept him on a tight leash, deliberately not letting him overthink the part.
• Kruger's touchstones for the near-wordless alien-in-a-body performance were John Carpenter's Starman, E.T. and the cult Australian film Bad Boy Bubby. He has said Fried Barry works against the sentimentality of Starman and E.T. on purpose, the flip side where the alien makes a heroin connection instead of a love connection.
• It was shot across 28 days spread over about a year and a half. Kruger wrote dialogue but workshopped and improvised heavily on set, with roughly 90% of the spoken material made up in the moment. Every performer improvised except Green, who was told only 30 to 40 minutes before each scene what he'd be shooting.
• Shudder picked it up and released it as a Shudder original on May 6, 2021, after a world premiere at the 2020 Cinequest Film Festival on March 6, 2020. It carries a 109-minute runtime.
• At the 2021 Africa Movie Academy Awards it landed seven nominations, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor, and won Achievement in Visual Effects. Joe Bob Briggs later featured it on a Season 3 episode of The Last Drive-In (Season 3, Episode 8).

The alien is a stand-in for addiction itself. Barry's already a hollowed-out junkie before the abduction, so the 'possession' reads as the high taking the wheel, a foreign thing steering a body the man already abandoned. The film never really restores Barry, which tracks: the drug doesn't give him back either.

Read it as a brutal joke on the 'innocent outsider learns about humanity' template. Starman and E.T. meet a gutter, and the alien's neutral curiosity exposes how casually awful people are, because the visitor commits horrors without malice and humans commit them on purpose.

The near-total absence of Barry's interiority is the point. He barely speaks and we never get inside his head, mirroring how the world treats men like him, as a blank body to be used, probed and discarded. The alien just makes literal what addiction and poverty already did to him.

Barry is a Cape Town junkie running on empty until something from elsewhere climbs into the driver's seat. An alien hijacks his wrecked body and takes it for a joyride through the city's worst corners, fumbling through sex, violence, fatherhood and a chainsaw or two while learning what a human even is. There's barely a plot and almost no dialogue from Barry himself, just a vacant stare wandering through a neon gutter. Ryan Kruger turns a possessed addict into an accidental tourist of human ugliness, and the trip never sobers up.