Critic Reviews

If Defa's aesthetics are mundane, his leads' performances are not, especially in the case of Audley, whose darting eyes and hushed, stuttering speech express confused longing with transfixing train-wreck magnetism.

Mr. Defa and his cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis, are united in their disdain for information over mood: as the camera skitters spastically around its troubled schlub, the film becomes a muddy, minimalist moan of desperation.

In Bad Fever, Dustin Guy Defa's sad-sack indie drama about loneliness and urban ennui, a stand-up routine becomes an outlet for personal pain, the stage a place to unload baggage.

Dustin Guy Defa's Bad Fever takes mumblecore to its reductio ad absurdum, featuring a hero whose utterances border on the unintelligible.