Comedy, Grief, and the Crypto Sink: Talking $POSITIONS with Director Brandon Daley

CUFF 2025 Spotlight – Interview with Director Brandon Daley

$POSITIONS screens April 18th at CUFF 2025 (Calgary Underground Film Festival), and Brandon Daley will be in town for it. I had the chance to catch up with him on Zoom before the festival, and from the jump, it was clear: this is a guy who loves making people laugh. Whether it’s through crypto disasters, unfortunate beer bongs, or throwaway jokes about bisexual uncles, Daley is here to entertain — and maybe, just maybe, make you feel something along the way.

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What is $POSITIONS About?

After premiering at SXSW 2025, $POSITIONS now makes its way to CUFF 2025 – a perfect home for Brandon Daley’s chaotic, hyper-topical debut. Equal parts absurdist comedy and full-blown anxiety spiral, the film follows Mike Alvarado, a broke Midwesterner who thinks crypto is his ticket out. Spoiler: it’s not.

Played with electric volatility by Michael Kunicki, Mike is an impulsive mess of bad decisions and screen addiction. But even as the jokes escalate – and they do – the film somehow finds space for grief, addiction, and something close to redemption.

For Daley, watching it with an audience at SXSW brought the film to life. “It’s designed to be a comedy, so watching it with a bunch of people for the first time is very fulfilling after sitting alone with it and my editor for a year and a half,” he says. “The jokes were landing; people seemed to like it. People got tense at the right times – it felt good.”

GameStop, r/wallstreetbets, and the “Crypto Sink”

There’s no smug moralizing in $POSITIONS – only the honest absurdity of making a bunch of dumb decisions in a row and living to joke about it. “I ended up making 25 grand on GameStop,” Brandon Daley says. “Then I put it into crypto. Then I made more. I was like, ‘Great, I’ll just put all of this in. This is really easy.’” (It wasn’t) “I think I rode it up to 70K… and then I didn’t sell – rode it down to 9K from the initial 25. I was like, ‘I’m the stupidest man in the world.’”

But $POSITIONS isn’t really about financial collapse. It’s about what constant screen-checking, chart-watching, and Discord doomscrolling does to your actual life. “You could lose 10 grand while you’re sleeping,” Daley says. “I’d be out at dinner, checking crypto on my phone. My friends were like, ‘Why are you doing this?’ And I’d be like, ‘You do not understand what’s going on right now, I’m losing thousands of dollars’”.

What stuck wasn’t the volatility – it was the void. “The money doesn’t bother me that much,” he says. “It’s the time. It just felt like a sink.”

$POSITIONS emerged from that headspace – one of compulsive watching, emotional numbing, and misplaced faith in systems no one fully understands. And yet, it’s not a film trying to tear crypto apart. “I still love crypto,” Daley says. “I want crypto people to watch this movie and be like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s me.’”

Creating Kansas in Chicago and Putting Comedy First

$POSITIONS may live in online culture, but it was born in small-town Kansas. Brandon Daley originally intended to film it with no crew, no real actors, and no budget. “I thought, I’m going to do this for $0 in Kansas, have it starring my actual family,” he says.

That changed when he was able to catch the attention of Chicago investors Eddie Linker and Stephen Lanus (both producers on Ghostlight, a CUFF film from last year, and one of my favourites of 2024). They agreed to finance the project and helped relocate the production to rural Illinois, where Daley and his team recreated the atmosphere of Midwestern small towns. “We were trying to make it feel like Kansas here in Chicago,” he says.

Though the premise riffs on digital addiction, $POSITIONS is equally rooted in Daley’s Midwestern background. “I wanted to make a movie about my family and growing up in a town like that,” he says. “It’s non-autobiographical, but it’s more of a vibe – an autobiographical vibe.”

That vibe is structured around a rare thing in indie film these days: jokes. Not comic relief – jokes. “I don’t think there are enough indie filmmakers who are comedy-specific,” Daley says. “I miss hard comedies. The studios aren’t doing it anymore; I feel independent film is the place to do it, but people are afraid to finance them.”

Ultimately, Daley leans in where others hedge. “I’m a very joke-forward writer. I will write entire plot lines just to do a joke that I want.” And even when the film hits heavier emotional beats, his goal remains simple: “I just want to make entertaining movies… as long as people are laughing and not bored.”

Mike and Vinny: The Chemistry That Grounds the Madness

In a film fuelled by bad decisions, the relationship between Mike and his brother (played by Vinny Kress) is a steady emotional anchor. Kress, who has Down syndrome, wasn’t written into the film with a specific diagnosis in mind. “The script was very vague about the brother character,” says Brandon Daley. “ I wanted that role to be catered to the specific developmental disability of whichever actor we found.”

Daley spent time meeting families from a range of backgrounds. “We had meetings with families with autism, with Down syndrome, and with genetic disorders,” he says. “We specifically found Vinny, and I loved his vibe and how he played off of Mike.”

The chemistry between Michael Kunicki and Kress was immediate. “Mike has the ability to take it to a thousand,” Daley says. “Then Vinny would laugh at him… saying, ‘Oh, Mike, you’re crazy, man.’” That rhythm of chaos and compassion gives the film some more weight.

To Daley’s credit, Vinny is never the target. “The laughs come from Vinny saying, ‘Come on, Mike,’ and from Mike spiraling,” he says. “Which I think is the right balance for having comedy with more sensitive things in the movie.”

While I would’ve loved to spend more time with Vinny and see him as an even more fleshed-out character, the choice to ground the role in his real-life personality – rather than writing from the outside – is what makes this relationship work.

Grief, Butterflies, and Dance Sequences

$POSITIONS is bookended by two moments that shouldn’t belong in the same movie – and yet, they feel inevitable.

At the end: a butterfly, quiet and unannounced. “My uncle Danny died of COVID in 2021,” Brandon Daley says. “My mom was struggling… I was here in Chicago; she was in Kansas, and I had a very hard time helping support my mom and having a sad parent.”

After the funeral, something happened. “A butterfly landed on my mom’s hand… She thought it was my uncle Danny visiting her,” he says. “That was very memorable… The ending is for her.”

At the beginning: full-blown absurdity. Mike quits his job, makes a little crypto money, and celebrates with a dance number. Daley didn’t plan to shoot it. “My producer came up to me and said, ‘For tomorrow, you want to cut the dance.’ I said, ‘We don’t need the dance.’” But when a dance crew became available, he changed his mind. “It’s the greatest thing in the opening – it was such a bold choice, but I almost didn’t do it.”

That’s the magic behind the orchestrated chaos of $POSITIONS – it doesn’t smooth out its contradictions. It embraces them.

Final Thoughts on $POSITIONS

$POSITIONS is at once a love letter and a critique – not just of crypto, but of trying too hard, caring too much, spiralling too fast. It’s built around jokes, yes, but it lands somewhere stranger: a comedy that becomes an apology, a confession, and an elegy for lost time.

There’s no neat moral to $POSITIONS, no clean lesson to take home. But there is catharsis – in the jokes, in the grief, in the quiet moments that sneak up on you. Daley isn’t out to judge his characters or the world they live in. He just wants to laugh with them – and in doing so, invite us to do the same.