The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood not only abides by Covid-19 restrictions but also dutifully skewers the Internet-based, conspiracy-minded lunatic fringe. Most films that deal with pseudoscientific, paranormal, supernatural and otherwise non-empirical claims approach their material from a believer’s point of view (and understandably so — it is fiction, after all); therefore, a comedy that ridicules crackpot beliefs is a welcome breath of fresh air.
Friends Wes Crowley (co-writer/director Joe Ahern) and Luke Dalton (Grant Harvey) set out to combat quarantine-related ennui by solving what they deem to be a missing person case while maintaining social distancing at all times. Consequently, they conduct the entirety of their investigation from their homes, zooming and face-timing, and using proxies to be their remote eyes and ears.
Whether deliberately or serendipitously, this state of affairs harks back to the likes of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter and H. Bustos Domecq’s (i.e., Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares) Don Isidro Parodi, both of whom solved or helped solve crimes from within the confines of their respective cells.
Wes and Luke take into their heads to determine the whereabouts of the title character, Wes’s estranged high school friend Toby Blackwood (co-writer Doug Mellard). Toby is a feckless, uber-paranoid survivalist nut whose YouTube channel tackles such non-issues as “Chemtrails and Yellow No. 5.” Counterintuitively yet unsurprisingly, Toby has a large and devoted following consisting of equally delusional whack jobs (including but not limited to “BigfootMamma42” and “Randy Midnight”).
When Toby “didn’t post an episode this week,” his fans naturally assume that someone or something has got him (Toby himself never knows “who’s out to get me,” which “leads me to a good point: always assume everyone’s out to get you. It’s a safe way to live”). Already bored with “TV and porn” (“even the weird shit”), Luke convinces Wes to look into the case, if only for the sake of something to do (“I wouldn’t give a damn if it weren’t for quarantine”).
Luke “wouldn’t be shocked if one of [Toby’s fans] was responsible” for Toby’s alleged disappearance, so he and Wes decide to start searching for leads in the “comment section.” The ensuing interview montage featuring a selection of Toby’s deranged fan base provides an incomplete but nevertheless representative sample of weird beliefs: the Titanic was an “inside job” to eliminate opposition to the creation of the Federal Reserve, the Mandela effect (e.g., “I remember a fifth Beatle called Trevor”), flat Earth, hollow Earth, the Illuminati, reptilians, the Thule Society, “adrenochrome harvested from children,” and “Not only is global warming a hoax … Weather is a hoax.”
This is not parody. People do believe in all those things and more. Wes and Luke do however come up with their own conspiracy theory to account for Toby’s vanishing: “we have reason to believe that Toby went to the Denver Airport, which houses Area 51 [“everyone knows that Area 51 is actually underneath the Denver Airport”], so that he could gain access to Bill Gates,” because Area 51 (which isn’t underneath the Denver Airport after all — that’s just “one big red herring” — but “in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, under the hole, of course”) is where Gates “got all the technology to start Microsoft.”
You know you’ve got good satire when the spoof is virtually indistiguishable from the real thing (Spinal Tap and Dethklok come to mind), and this whole Bill Gates-Area 51 thing simply reeks of something that your average tinfoil hat-wearing loony would (and maybe even does) believe — not least because it turns out to be so much balderdash; the explanation for Toby’s disappearance is actually rather mundane (a nod to the principle of parsimony) as well as exemplary (without revealing too much, it’s safe to say that his way of life comes back to bite him).
And now the damn veggies. The last shot involves a twist that sort of defeats what to me is or at least should be the purpose of the movie. It’s just a silly, throwaway joke; then again, the film had thus far been ‘funny because it’s true’ — and, like Mel Brooks wrote, “the thing about satire is the walls, the floors, the costumes; everything surrounding the comedy has to be real.”
The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood is for the most part short and sweet, but those final 30 seconds give it an unnecessary, bitter aftertaste (there’s also a post-credits scene that I did not watch because the closing credits are always and forever my cue to leave).