Inside the Rot: Oliver Bernsen on Bagworm, Family, and Making the Movie You Can Make
What is Bagworm About?
I had been aware of Bagworm from its North American Premiere at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival, but I wasn’t able to catch it there. That made finally seeing it at the Calgary Underground Film Festival feel like a bit of good fortune, especially because this is the sort of film that is much easier to experience than to summarise. It is the kind of movie that makes a standard logline feel incredibly insufficient.
This was all clear before I even sat down with Oliver Bernsen. The day before our interview, my partner asked me the most normal question in the world: “What is this one about?” I had an answer, sort of, but not a clean one. There is the surface-level premise that you can find on the internet, of course. A sexually frustrated hammer salesman named Carroll steps on a rusty nail and begins moving through an increasingly warped physical and psychological spiral. The world around him seems to decay as quickly as his body does.
Ultimately, though, the film is difficult to pin down in any meaningful way.
When I put that question to Bernsen, he laughed and told me, “Yeah, don’t ask me.” Then he gave the best answer available. “It’s a character study about a guy who’s at this point in his life where he feels like…the whole world around him has gone bad,” he said, before narrowing in on what matters most. That Carroll is a man “at this very low point in his life” who is trying to understand “why are things so, so shitty and bad,” while remaining blind to the fact that “his world is also shitty and bad because of what he’s kind of done to it.” In other words, Bagworm is not simply about external decay. It is about a man misreading the state of the world because he cannot properly face the state of himself.
That framing gets at what I find so compelling about the film. On the surface, Bagworm looks like one of those wild, grotesque descents into bodily horror and social rot, and it absolutely has that energy. But beneath that, or perhaps inside it, is something much quieter. It is also a man in a room, alone. It is a film about self-loathing, denial, isolation, and the ways private collapse can distort everything outside the self. Bernsen told me he is drawn to that same contradiction: the Terry Gilliam-style odyssey into mayhem and madness, but also the restrained story of a family sitting in a house and quietly unravelling. Bagworm sits somewhere between those poles, and that is a major part of what gives it its strange power.
The World Outside and the House Within
Another reason the film works as well as it does is that Carroll’s house does not feel like any other location. It is an extension of himself. It is sickly, cramped, grimy, and somehow both dead and still breathing. On screen, it serves less as a backdrop and more as an organ, slowly decaying with the rest of Carroll’s body.
This house we see on screen was also born out of the same kind of scrappy problem-solving that defines so much independent filmmaking. Bernsen told me that they first found “this burned-down house” across from where his brother Henry Bernsen, who wrote the film, was living, and the initial impulse was simple: “We want to shoot a movie that takes place in this house.” But reality intervened quickly. The place was, in his words, “really dangerous.” They were inside “moving things around, trying to figure out where we could put this and that,” and, as Bernsen put it, “you’d pull a beam and it would sound like the whole roof would drop two feet.” So, while Bagworm may feel diseased and unstable by design, its central location began as something genuinely precarious.
So they did what independent filmmakers do when the original plan fails: they built another one. Henry had access to an enormous garage-like space, originally made for an RV, and the team cleared it out and constructed the interior there. His brother, Angus Bernsen, worked alongside production designer Tyler Evans to rebuild the inside of the house from scratch. And, as a result, it has the texture of something handled, shaped, and worried over.
That artistry, it turns out, runs deep in the family. During our conversation, Bernsen started tracing the line and realized just how many generations deep his family goes in performance, entertainment, and craft. His father is an actor. His mother acted. His grandparents and great-grandparents worked as actors, agents, producers, and radio personalities. He also talked about the other side of that inheritance, the practical side. His father built houses when he was younger. His uncle is a carpenter. There is a reason Bagworm feels handmade in the best sense of the word. It comes from people for whom art is not only an idea, but a trade, and a way of building something physical out of very little.
That family presence is all over the film. Henry wrote it. Angus helped shape the built environment around it. Bernsen’s father appears in the film, and his uncle turns up too, after an earlier casting plan had to be adjusted because of knee surgery. Even one of the beach houses seen on screen had an immediate family connection. Bernsen told me that the house his father’s character lives in was his uncle’s house, but that it later burned down in the Palisades fires. He added that “all of that entire row of houses on the beach where he’s sitting is all just gone.” That gives the movie another strange layer. Even before you get to metaphor, memory is already in the frame.
Not Waiting for Perfect Conditions
There is a good lesson here for anyone who talks endlessly about wanting to make a film and then waits for the right moment to arrive. Bagworm is not the product of people waiting around for ideal circumstances. It is the work of people asking a more difficult, but perhaps more useful question: what can we make right now?
Bernsen told me he and Henry had been trying to mount a larger, more straight-up horror film before this. They wrote it, spent months trying to get it made, and eventually had to admit that it was not happening, at least not yet. Then Bernsen drove past the burned-down house, the smaller idea appeared, and they shifted their energy into something they could actually do. As a result, Bagworm was born out of creative redirection, out of giving up on one thing to make the thing that was possible.
That didn’t mean the process became simple. Bernsen said they wrote the full script, shot roughly two-thirds of the film, ran out of money, stopped, edited what they had, figured out more clearly what the film wanted to be, rewrote the ending, and then went back out to shoot the final third. He described it as a kind of “improv writing,” a process in which the film kept evolving through the act of being made. That is one of the more interesting things about Bagworm. It has the messiness of something discovered in motion, but it never feels shapeless. If anything, the interruption seems to have forced greater clarity.
There is an honesty in the way Bernsen talks about all of this that I appreciate. He did not romanticize the money problem. They crowdfunded. He went back to work as a landscape designer and tried to build the coffers back up until they hit the number they needed. That isn’t glamorous. It is also, for many filmmakers, what making a movie actually looks like. The mythology of independent cinema tends to fixate on inspiration and serendipity. The reality usually also involves picking up work, stretching every dollar, and coming back when you can afford to keep going.
At the same time, the interruption became a strange blessing. Because they had to stop, they could look at the film as it existed, rather than as they had imagined it. They could discover what the ending needed to be instead of simply marching toward the one they had first written. For a film like Bagworm, where mood, subjectivity, and an accumulation of dread matter so much, that seems especially important. It lets the movie become itself.
The 16mm Look of Bagworm
The look of Bagworm is not ornamental. It is central to the experience of the film. Bernsen and I spoke about shooting on 16mm and discovering how expensive a good decision can be.
He said the intention was always to shoot on film. “The very quick answer is yes,” he told me, even if he admitted that, had they fully done the math earlier, they “maybe would have balked at the idea.” Film stock, processing, scanning, all of it became enormously expensive, to the point that he described it as nearly three-quarters of the entire budget. Before settling there, they had even tested a radically cheaper version of the movie on Super 8, imagining something far scrappier and more overtly DIY. But Bernsen realized that while the test was “interesting and cool,” it also would have been “a very inaccessible” version of the film. 16mm gave them something rough and tactile, but still legible, still capable of carrying a strange sort of beauty.
I am wary of treating film stock as a magic trick, as though shooting on celluloid automatically grants a work seriousness or soul. It does not. But sometimes the material reality of an image matters, and Bagworm needs that tactile instability. It needs that depth. It needs the feeling that the image itself has been weathered. Bernsen put it plainly: you cannot really emulate what they got. I think he is right.
It also shaped the process in practical terms. Shooting on film forced discipline. Bernsen said they were usually doing one or two takes per angle, and the whole film was shot in fourteen days. There was no room to drift. You rehearse, you know what you need, and you move. That pressure seems to suit the movie. The performances feel alive, but not indulgent, and the filmmaking feels alert, but fluid.
And, much of this visual language comes down to the cinematography from Adriel Gonzalez. Bernsen described the conversations with Gonzalez in documentary terms. He wanted the film to feel as though these people and spaces already existed, and the camera had simply arrived to observe them. He referenced Grizzly Man, the Maysles, and Grey Gardens, then described the goal as something like a documentary approach with occasional cinematic flourishes. That balance is exactly what the film achieves.
Peter Falls and the Weight of Carroll
That observational approach places enormous weight on Peter Falls, and he carries it. The film would simply not work without the right actor at its centre. Carroll has to be abrasive, pathetic, funny, exhausting, and, against all better judgment, weirdly watchable. The role needs someone who can be a complete pain in the ass without turning the audience away for good.
Bernsen told me they actually had another actor lined up for much of the prep, only to lose him close to shooting. Suddenly, they had roughly two weeks to find a new Carroll. “The train is going, and we’re not stopping this thing,” he said. Their first call was Peter Falls. Bernsen sent him the script, Falls “read it twice that night” and called the next morning, excited. Bernsen said he knew in that moment, knowing Peter and “what he’s capable of,” that they had their guy.
Watching the film, that confidence makes sense. Bernsen likened Falls to Richard Dreyfuss, and I knew immediately what he meant. There is something prickly and oddly inviting about him. Bernsen described a quality where Peter can seem bristly and still remain endearing, where even an insult lands with a strangely human charge underneath it. That is exactly what makes Carroll watchable. He is not softened into easy empathy, but he is also never flattened into pure repulsion. There is always some little flicker of life under the ugliness.
Bernsen pointed to a tiny unscripted moment at an Italian restaurant, when a server asks Carroll if he wants pepper and he pauses for a beat before saying no. This moment gets a laugh every time, and I understand why. Bernsen said it is “so genuinely funny” because Falls is just “playing the strangeness of this reaction,” and that tiny beat tells you everything about how he is playing the man: suspicious, withholding, petty, strange, and somehow funny, almost against his will. Those are the kinds of moments that keep a film like this from collapsing under its own misery.
The Backseat Freestyle
There is one scene in Bagworm that I have not stopped thinking about, and it is also one of the hardest to discuss without spoiling the rhythm of how it lands. If you have seen the film, you know the one. It’s the backseat “freestyle”, if that is even the right term for it.
Part of what makes the moment so memorable is that it is hilariously over the top and remarkably subdued at the same time. It is not some slick, crowd-pleasing outburst. It is awkward, deadpan, drawn-out, and increasingly absurd and horrific. It feels like a man quietly wandering further and further into his own anti-charisma, and it should not work as well as it does.
I asked Bernsen where it came from, assuming, perhaps, that it had been written for Peter by Henry, but that was not the case. “That was Pete, man,” Bernsen told me. The actors were each told to write something of their own, but the key was that it should not feel polished or secretly brilliant. As Bernsen put it, “It needs to just feel like you actually are freestyling.” For Peter specifically, the prompt was even more precise. It had to keep building and building, but in the worst possible way, until it landed in that uniquely embarrassing register where, as Bernsen said, it should feel like “oh, God, here he goes again. This is terrible.” It turns out that the only hard rule was that it had to end with the word “carrot”, because, well… of course that was the only rule.
That story says a lot about how this film works. Even one of its funniest and most unforgettable bits is not the product of over-engineering. It came from a strong prompt, trust in the actor, and an understanding of tone. It also says something about Bernsen’s interest in performance more generally. Bagworm is full of things that feel both controlled and slightly unstable.
Back Through Calgary
By the end of our conversation, Bernsen was already talking about what comes next. He said the response to Bagworm had been strong enough that he, Henry, Peter, and much of the same team want to keep going rather than wait around for something bigger and more official. He also said that while he was in Calgary, he and Henry had started cooking up ideas for a film set here, including one that would take place largely in Caesars and in the labyrinth of the city’s skywalks. Honestly, that alone would be enough to get my attention.
But what stayed with me more than the Calgary tease was the broader ethos underneath it. Bagworm is a very good reminder that independent cinema does not have to choose between ambition and limitation. Sometimes the limitation is the route into the ambition. Sometimes the smaller, stranger, more doable idea is the one that actually lets a filmmaker say the thing they need to say.
That is what Bagworm feels like to me. It is grotesque, yes. It is funny. It is uncomfortable. It is often downright nasty. But it is also intimate in a way that a lot of more polished films are not. Beneath the rusty nail, the sickness, the rot, and the absurdity is a recognizable human state: a man externalizing what he cannot admit about himself, turning inward, collapse into a warped reading of the world. The film is messy because Carroll is messy. It is contradictory because he is contradictory. And somehow, through all of that grime, Bernsen and his collaborators have made something unnervingly precise.
That is not easy to do. It is even harder to explain. Which, in the end, may be the most fitting thing about Bagworm.
