Slouching Towards Oblivion: On "Drinking and Driving" by Avalon Fast & Jillian Frank
by Cole Martin for The 44 North, Contributing Writer - Politics
"Drinking and Driving adeptly conjures this pervasive but hard-to-articulate feeling—that of rocketing toward calamity while being utterly stagnant. Uncertainty hangs over every scene like a miasma, draping the azure British Columbian sky like wildfire smoke."
Responding to a question about what makes their film feel so Canadian, Jillian Frank, one of the creators of 2026’s Drinking and Driving, said that she and co-creator Avalon Fast had tried to make the small British Columbia town they filmed in look “aesthetic,” but couldn’t. The houses, the lone convenience store, the shitty roads—none of it was romantic. However, their inability to portray a kitschy “Canadiana” is far from a demerit, and perhaps exactly what makes Drinking and Driving, in my mind, a refreshing, truthful film.
Drinking and Driving is different fare than expected from Avalon Fast, who, alongside the aforementioned Jillian Frank, has built a reputation in indie cinema as a proponent of “Girl-horror,” a subgenre of horror with an express mission to reject the male gaze that is so dominant in the space. The result is films that feel genuinely subversive, not through cheap grotesquery and/or thin social critique, but through refusing to participate in the tired tropes and clichés that have defined the genre since its inception, leading to unique, genre-blending experiments.
Set in 2016, Drinking and Driving follows early-twenties duo Palmer and Iris as they spend a summer kissing one another at Palmer’s Grandma’s mobile home; loitering by the dragway; working at the diner; sunbathing at the swimming hole; binging alcohol and drugs at friends of friends’ house parties; oscillating between sexual and romantic partners; and, yes, participating in one of Canada’s infamous rural hobbies: Drinking and driving. Much to the film’s credit, it doesn’t pause to moralize about its characters’ various indiscretions; instead, it merely presents experiences, leaving the ruminating to the viewer, utterly nonplussed about what reproval one might muster. As spectators, we’re merely along for the ride, learning (or relearning) alongside Palmer and Iris a fundamental, paradoxical principle of life: That things never really change, but also will never be the same again.
Though it lacks the ethereal witchiness of Camp (2026) or the bloody girlhood emancipations of their feature debut Honeycomb (2022), Fast and Frank’s latest is not without its horrors. Drinking and Driving eschews the overtly supernatural and morbid, opting instead to capture the sombre and the sublime which subsist in the everyday. Beauty and sadness linger silently in the scenes, hiding in dense, dark woods, squirrely, clandestine backroads, the twilight of a house party, the glow of a television, and the laughter of fast friends, only disturbing the characters when they dare to pay attention to them… Or when they’re tragically forced to.
In Crash (1996), Canadian filmmaker and body-horror darling David Cronenberg (adapting the 1973 J.G. Ballard novel) critically examines the concept of a car crash, ultimately deploying it as a metaphor for society’s fetishization of technology and information, and their encroachment on the personal and psychological. The car crash is similarly symbolic in Drinking and Driving, but its reality remains speculative, shifting it from a concrete phenomenon to an eternal possibility; representing, perhaps, the number of ever-looming catastrophes younger generations have inherited and have been anticipating with no end in sight. Drinking and Driving adeptly conjures this pervasive but hard-to-articulate feeling—that of rocketing toward calamity while being utterly stagnant. Uncertainty hangs over every scene like a miasma, draping the azure British Columbian sky like wildfire smoke.
To be a young person today is to be presented with any number of futures that feel as though they all inevitably point to the same end, like parallel lines converging just past the horizon, or a pair of cars on a collision course. I’m sure many young people can attest to feeling this way, like they’re too late to generate their own momentum, even though they have most of their life ahead of them. Such listlessness and dread bring to mind John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, with Palmer, Iris, and friends functioning as a modern parallel of Mack and the Boys: Refusing a futile fight, they resolve to watch time pass by, endeavouring to enjoy themselves with the means available to them, no matter how harmful or destructive.
“It’s all fine to say: ‘Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget’ — and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget, and you are in the middle of something that does not change.”
(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row)
And, akin to Cannery Row, Drinking and Driving yields little in the way of a true resolution. Though many finalities are depicted in the film—death of childhood and innocence; death of the possibility of professional and economic prosperity; death of loved ones; and, most importantly for Palmer and Iris, death of the self—none of it is explicitly sublimated into a greater purpose. Instead, through drugs, reckless sex and reckless driving, we witness these characters approach what they most desire and what, in the strange and disarming finale, they potentially receive: A merging, not of body and machine (as in the case of Crash), but of body and body, soul and soul.
If the characters in Drinking and Driving can be said to embody anything, it is the death drive: The desire, sometimes dormant, sometimes not, to accelerate towards a conclusion. To stop all the waiting… To reach the finality that only accompanies dissolution. Thankfully, however, the film is not entirely ignorant of its angst. Just when it threatens to verge into over-sentimentality or sneering edginess, it deftly pulls back with a charming musical montage, a thoughtful refrain, or a self-aware joke, almost as though the filmmakers are reassuring you that they, too, were anticipating the eye-roll. Teasing it.
This self-assured attitude is true of the film in general—although undoubtedly a work of nostalgia, it never descends into unexamined deference (there is no “simpler” time being pointed to, only different kinds of complicated). As such, I find it hard to label it a coming-of-age film, because the characters never really step into a new age. Rather, their 2016 summer feels both eternal and terminal, a sort of west-coast purgatory. Though we as the audience know that a new age is incumbent with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in a few years, Palmer and Iris don’t need to: It probably won’t change a whole lot for them anyway.
What elevates Drinking and Driving over other indie run-and-gun hangout movies (colloquially referred to as “mumblecore” films) is its stellar principal cast, effortlessly executed humour, and total lack of inhibition when taking big swings (the ending being chief among them). The film’s ability to express, through subtle, mundane imagery and sleepy, reticent interactions, the nihilism and seemingly inescapable stagnation that accompany modernity perhaps explains why many young people, regardless of nationality, are connecting with it.
Cole Martin is a writer from Atlantic Canada. He can be found on Bluesky @coleboy.bsky.social
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