Hogwash (2023)

Hogwash takes viewers on a kaleidoscopic and comic trip through Oubliette, Louisiana, where a diverse array of obsessives and romantics are driven by improbable dreams and fiery cravings. We begin with Thomas Partridge, an amateur documentarian who finds beauty in the mundane. Then there's Thomas's wife Jerika, a loud-mouthed bookie, and her sister Phoebe, a conspiracy-obsessed house cleaner. If there is a plot to be found, it is driven by the Women's League of Oubliette, a shady charity organization that will stop at nothing to produce an opera penned by local libertine and playwright Claudius Flambeau, who is, for some reason, quickly descending into madness. Throw in a bayou cruise boat captain who looks like Rip Van Winkle, a crooked lawyer who knows the meaning of maps, a young Kentucky gentleman gone to seed, a clueless mayor and her frustrated handlers, and a former debutante who might be psychic, and you've got a chicken-scratch recipe for a small-town mystery whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Hogwash fully embraces the whimsical and ephemeral. Characters come and go. One red herring leads to another red herring and then another and another. Mysteries emerge only to dissolve in a swampy murk of incoherence. Reality becomes a comedy before it turns hallucinatory, while beauty springs forth from the mundane.