Have you ever moved somewhere new, immediately decided it was the greatest place on Earth, and then spent the next several weeks desperately trying to prove to everyone around you that you deserved to be there? Has the city itself ever barged into your bedroom, looked you dead in the eyes, and told you to pack your shit and go home?

That happened to my buddy Willy.

Adam Kelleher’s New York Movie follows Willy (Will Duncan), an Irish transplant who arrives in New York completely enamoured with the city. That love starts curdling pretty quickly after a seemingly innocuous attempt to photograph a couple in the park goes sideways. Before long, Willy becomes increasingly preoccupied with how he’s being perceived, sending his attempts to make his way into the city’s social fabric down some strange paths and causing the line between his own paranoia and New York’s opinion of him to blur.

It’s a pretty perfect premise for a city that has been mythologized to death. I’m not a New Yorker, but every time I’ve visited I feel simultaneously like I am the main character and that absolutely nobody gives a shit about me. Kelleher takes that exact contradiction and turns it into the central joke of New York Movie. 

He said that he wanted to capture the experience of arriving somewhere new; being spellbound by your surroundings and becoming hyper-aware of yourself within them. That idea comes through most clearly in the film’s treatment of social interaction. When you’re new somewhere, a single awkward encounter can take on an outsized significance, making you question if you’re “living” correctly. Willy’s spiral throughout the film is absurd, but the circumstances surrounding it feel very based in reality. The line between social anxiety and actual humiliation is already pretty thin in NYC, so none of this requires too much embellishment. 

Visually, Kelleher gives Willy’s anxiety a suitably manic playground. Shot on 16mm and punctuated by hand-drawn animation, New York Movie has the scrappy, tactile quality of the independent American cinema it draws from, while still feeling new and exciting. The animation in particular pushes Willy’s ridiculous internal reality outward without losing the texture of the city around him. It’s a gorgeous and effective combination, and the roughness of the film stock shows an authentic New York, rather than a polished piece of tourism propaganda.

By the end of its 9-minute run, New York Movie has told a hilariously harrowing tale, probably universal to any transplant experience, but it is NYC’s particular brand of hostility that presents itself as an isolated circumstance, something you need to participate in order to survive there.

The degraded must become the degrader.

Kelleher wanted to make something “genuinely entertaining” and he very much succeeded, but New York Movie still has plenty going on beneath the surface, even if it would probably prefer you not to make too big a deal about it. The film knows there are deeper things to say about identity and belonging; it just has the good sense to let a guy get dommed and cucked by a city instead.