Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | June 10, 2026
Is there such a thing as Liminal Comedy? Liminal Horror is getting all of the attention this summer with stuff like Backrooms but the unreal meta space that Gen Z occupies as they awkwardly straddle the virtual and the analog world as Late Stage Capitalism’s gaping maw yawns beneath, can and should also be mined for discomfort laughs too. And that’s squarely where writer-director Rob Rice’s sly and strange little film Ponderosa lands-a showcase for the superbly off-kilter talents of actors Bill Camp and Jack Dylan Grazer, this mostly two-hander that just premiered at Tribeca will definitely walk away as one of the most memorable of the fest.
Zeke (Grazer) is a listless young man wandering about a suburban netherworld of shuttered store-fronts and stretches of patchy dirt tangled up in power lines as far as the eye can behold. Without much purpose to his days Zeke spends a lot of time visiting his single mom Sandra (Alexis Bledel) at the Ponderosa Steak House where she works, just off the highway - here everything is “just off the highway.” And Rice has a great eye for capturing the boundlessly bland spaces of suburban sprawl, where there’s ten feet between every empty table and an endless buffet that boggles the imagination. One of everything but none for all.
(A smart double-feature with Ponderosa would be Buffet Infinity, the surreal suburban sprawl nightmare that’s now out on VOD.)
It’s at the titular steakhouse where Zeke first meets George (Camp), a middle-aged middle -anager in corporate real-estate who’s one of the addled brains behind building out said sprawl. (That his current personality-free development is called “Walden Colonies” stands a fine joke on its own.) Actually the two’s “meet cute” happens outside the restaurant, in the parking lot, where George stands pressed against his ghastly-sized pick-up waiting (one might call it “lurking” if George wasn’t so meek about it), for the boy to come wandering outside, as such boys are prone to do. Eventually. With very little energy to it. But once Zeke does George hops on him with a great and suspicious enthusiasm, as if it’s his one-man mission to give this directionless youth a direction to point that thing.
And yes, projecting here a touch of uncomfortable sexual aspect onto this bond-to-be is not out of place, as the film makes great hay out of the WTF nature of George’s sudden and single-minded obsession with this kid. Picking him up in a parking lot, immediately offering the indifferent Zeke a job at his building company—George’s motivations remain foggy at best, unsettling at most of all. Calling this a “NAMBLA Comedy” would indeed be an edgelord provocation from me, and yet. And yet!
Especially once George brings Zeke to hang out at a back-yard cook-out with his “friends,” a cabal of indistinguishably boring men in indistinguishably boring Braunhemden who might as well be barbecuing the air for all the dispassion their routine evokes. All while down in the basement a pack of silent and savage-seeming teen boys attack barbells, feral-like. Toss a football, rassle for show, rinse and repeat. It’s what men do!
These are automatons—even Zeke in his indecipherable way, although he seems to see through the Suburban Dad-Son posturing that single, desperate and childless George is threatening him with in great abundance. Zeke likes his perfectly lovely mom, the two of them seem to get along just fine, and he doesn’t seem to feel the need to slot himself into the evangelized conventionality that this huckster in Patagonia is huckstering.
Without being too claustrophobic about it Rice obviously has the great Boomer to Z generational divide aimed in his cross-hairs, and the magnetic repulsion between George and Zeke is Ponderosa’s great and funny circus. Because as hard as George presses Zeke can only stare back confounded, causing the elder to turn more and more frantic in his mentoring stabs—after all his own manhood is at stake here! If he can’t mold a young man into his own image what, and why, even is he? The abyss yawns at him too.
And so, under the town’s water-tower lit up red like a cartoon thermometer about to pop, these two quizzical creatures engage in silent, friendly-ish combat. The infuriating blankness that Grazer (so terrific and annoying in a different way in Luca Guadagnino’s still profoundly under-appreciated We Are Who We Are series for HBO) greets Camp’s every despondent outreach with is a case study in funny contrast—these two make for an anti-comedy Abbott & Costello, boundless cringe standing in for slapstick. There will be no extravagant wordplay, no perfectly timed and choreographed pratfalls. I mean who even cares who’s on First anymore? In this economy?
‘Ponderosa’ just premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival.
