Tripolar: The Movie

Tripolar The Movie (2025)

Dir: Eleanor Gaver

Critic Screener for Chicago Underground Film Festival 2025 • Published first at CINE-FILE

Eleanor Gaver, who has directed a film each decade since the 1980s, returns once more with the sense of passing the torch to a younger generation. Absurdist comedy has long been her terrain: her 1998 film LIFE IN THE FAST LANE told the story of a street artist who mails himself to his crush, only to be fatally stabbed when she opens the package. Gaver’s most recent film before TRIPOLAR, HERE ONE MINUTE (2015), was made on a shoestring budget and under her full control—casting performers she found on the street alongside students from the Stella Adler Studio. Working with them, she rewrote and improvised until the dialogue sounded as raw and lived-in as the actors themselves. One of those students, Schuyler Quinn, impressed enough to earn a producer’s credit, and soon after she and Gaver launched Invincible Film. 

What began as a web series about making a movie together eventually mutated into a feature: TRIPOLAR THE MOVIE. The result is a THC-infused odyssey about getting an independent film made in New York. But more than that, TRIPOLAR is a stoner comedy with pedigree, standing proudly alongside HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE (2004) and PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (2008). Like its Cheech and Chong ancestors, it thrives on skits only loosely tethered to a plot, its spirit is closer to vaudeville chaos than traditional storytelling. Gaver laces the film with moments worthy of 1970s John Waters, pushing the genre past cheap gags into a delirious, transgressive playground. 

We follow a cast of gloriously unhinged and morally bankrupt characters, all eager to escape reality through a haze of weed, pills, and psychedelics while trying to make a movie on less money than an Ed Wood production. An ex-lax induced race for a toilet becomes the thesis for the film as a whole: life’s just shit! Life is chock full of golden showers, drugging your friends, setting up your film crew as Islamic terrorists, prison sentences, fornicating around pot plants, and drinking bong water laced with LSD;  but who would want it any other way? With little to no plot to get in the way, the characters, ridiculous situations, and ample amount of drugs take center stage. While popping Ambient, Klonopin, Xanax, hits of acid, and a constant rotation of joints, our leads battle film financiers, ageism, racism, gender politics, and attempt remaking THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939). Divine would be honored by dog-shit yellow brick roads. The great and powerful Oz is depicted as Trump asking to be called God. Oz’s voice is created completely from edited Trump soundbites. 

Gaver herself plays Lana Cockburn, the matriarch of a house full of misfits - though “matriarch” here means handing out drugs to her daughter’s best friend and then kicking her own child out in favor of the new recruit, Daphne (Quinn). Gaver and Quinn riff with the kind of rhythm usually reserved for seasoned comic duos like Abbott and Costello or Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy. To call TRIPOLAR plotless would be missing the point. Stoner comedies, after all, are less about narrative momentum than about vibe, invention, and the delirious freedom to derail. The genre has always thrived on tangents, from Cheech and Chong’s rambling bits to Gregg Araki’s cotton-candy haze in SMILEY FACE (2007). Gaver carries that tradition forward with a no-budget punk sensibility, reminding us that these films endure not despite their messiness, but because of it. 

Trying to track a linear story here is like reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas just to find out who won the Mint 400. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here for the drugs, the chaos, and the joy of watching performers leap headfirst into absurdity. TRIPOLAR doesn’t just pass the torch to a younger generation, it sets the damn thing ablaze, puffs twice, and asks if you want in on this.