Comedy, Grief, and the Crypto Sink: Talking $POSITIONS with Director Brandon Daley

CUFF 2025 Spotlight – Interview with Director Brandon Daley

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$POSITIONS screens on April 18th at CUFF 2025 (Calgary Underground Film Festival). Director Brandon Daley will be attending the screening. I spoke with him over Zoom before the festival, and from the first minute Daley made it clear he loves making people laugh — even when the laughs sit beside grief, addiction, or personal collapse. The film mixes absurdist comedy with an anxiety spiral driven by crypto culture, beer bongs, and sharply staged jokes about family life.

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What is $POSITIONS About?

After its premiere at SXSW 2025, $POSITIONS arrives at CUFF 2025 as Brandon Daley’s chaotic, hyper-topical debut. Equal parts outlandish comedy and emotional unraveling, the film follows Mike Alvarado, a broke Midwesterner convinced crypto will change his life. Played with electric intensity by Michael Kunicki, Mike is an impulsive, screen-addicted mess whose bad choices escalate into consequences both ridiculous and real.

Daley describes the project as designed for audiences: “It’s a comedy, and seeing it with a crowd at SXSW made the film come alive. The jokes landed, and people tightened up in the right spots — that felt great.” Beneath the punchlines, the film opens space for grief and addiction, ultimately carving a path that hints at redemption without flattening complexity into a neat moral.

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GameStop, r/wallstreetbets, and the “Crypto Sink”

There is no smug sermon in $POSITIONS; the film’s truth is the absurdity of repeated poor choices and the discomfort of living to laugh about them later. Daley’s own financial rollercoaster inspired much of the film’s emotional core. He recalls making money on GameStop, moving those earnings into crypto, and watching gains evaporate: “I rode it up to 70K and then didn’t sell — rode it down to 9K from the initial 25. I felt like the stupidest man in the world.”

But the movie isn’t merely a story of financial loss. It’s about the toll of constant screen-checking, chart-watching, and endless doomscrolling — the way time and attention are swallowed. “It’s not just the money,” Daley says. “It’s the time. It felt like a sink.” That compulsion — the emotional numbness, the obsessive monitoring of markets and chats — became the film’s central atmosphere.

Even so, Daley doesn’t set out to condemn the technology wholesale. “I still love crypto,” he admits. He hopes people within that community will recognize themselves in the film: the hunger, the panic, and the strange humor that comes with showing up for your own collapse.

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Creating Kansas in Chicago and Putting Comedy First

Though its subject is digital, $POSITIONS is rooted in Midwestern life. Daley first imagined the project as a zero-budget film shot in Kansas with his own family, but Chicago producers Eddie Linker and Stephen Lanus helped finance and relocate production to rural Illinois. The goal was to recreate the look and feel of small-town Kansas while leaning into sharper comic instincts.

Daley’s approach is unapologetically joke-forward. He lamented a lack of bold comedies in both studio and indie spaces and intentionally built this film around laugh-first storytelling. “I write plotlines to land specific jokes,” he says. Still, when heavier beats arrive, the comedy never undercuts emotional truth; instead, it creates a rhythm that keeps audiences engaged and humane.

Mike and Vinny: The Chemistry That Grounds the Madness

The relationship between Mike and his brother is the film’s emotional anchor. Vinny Kress, who has Down syndrome, was not cast into a role written specifically around a diagnosis; instead, Daley sought an actor whose real personality would shape the character. He met with families from different backgrounds and chose Vinny based on the genuine warmth and chemistry he brought to the part.

Michael Kunicki and Vinny Kress developed an immediate, lived-in rhythm: Mike’s escalating antics meet Vinny’s steady, often humorous responses. Daley is careful not to make Vinny the punchline; the laughs come from Mike’s spirals and Vinny’s reactions. That balance — humor married to respect — gives the film emotional depth without cheap shots.

Grief, Butterflies, and Dance Sequences

$POSITIONS bookends its story with two contrasting moments that, surprisingly, feel inevitable. The film opens with a bold, celebratory dance sequence after Mike quits his job and briefly makes some crypto money — a choice Daley almost cut, but later embraced when a dance crew became available. He calls it the film’s greatest opening move: audacious and funny.

It closes with a quiet, poignant image: a butterfly. Daley ties that ending to a personal memory after losing his uncle Danny to COVID in 2021. After the funeral, a butterfly landed on his mother’s hand, and she took it as a sign. That moment informed the film’s finale — a small, tender note of consolation that reframes the film’s chaos.

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Final Thoughts on $POSITIONS

$POSITIONS operates as both a love letter and a critique — not just of crypto culture but of obsession, wasted time, and the messy attempt to hold everything together. It’s a comedy built around sharp jokes, but those jokes lead into an unexpected space: confession, apology, and elegy for lost hours. There’s no tidy moral, and that’s part of its power. Daley doesn’t set out to judge his characters; he wants audiences to laugh with them, feel for them, and perhaps recognize a bit of themselves in the chaos.

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