No! You’re Wrong Review: Deconstructing the Noir with Crispin Glover

No! You’re Wrong, often presented with the subtitle or: Spooky Action at a Distance, is the latest feature directed by and starring Crispin Glover. Any honest account of the experience starts with the format. The film plays as one piece within a multi-hour theatrical evening that Glover tours. He frames the screening with live performance, reads from his published books, and closes the night with an extended, unmoderated question and answer session.

This release signals a shift in the director’s narrative emphasis. Earlier projects leaned into aggressively provocative material, while this work adopts a more stylized and tender register. The piece functions as an era-spanning noir thriller written for Glover and his father, Bruce Glover. A second track runs alongside it: a meta-docudrama that comments on the noir’s creation. Beauty and methodical oddness shape the first impression, and the storytelling announces a new direction for the artist.

Constructing an Anti-Narrative

The structural design of No! You’re Wrong sets a deliberate challenge for the viewer. Two distinct works appear as one: a period noir and a contemporary account of how that noir came to be. The noir unfolds across multiple eras beginning in the late 1800s.

The companion piece, Spooky Action at a Distance, slices into the action with observations about process. Editing choices collapse time and reality, and the resulting rhythm steers the audience into a dream state where scenes echo rather than resolve.

Form reinforces this deliberate disorientation. The film is shot largely in black and white, with nods to early photographic techniques and a plainly deliberate, almost first-year art student aesthetic. Craft details arrive with meticulous care, even when they read as idiosyncratic.

Handmade miniature sets, unnerving silicone mask figures, and Glover’s specific methods for developing segments all sit on the surface. The fractured chronology and tactile imagery place the movie in ongoing conversation with surrealist traditions in cinema, with a clear line of influence from David Lynch. The storytelling pursues layered suggestion and sustained unease rather than tidy clarity.

The Performance of Self and Story

A central engine in the narrative architecture is the relationship between Crispin Glover and his father, veteran actor Bruce Glover. They cycle through multiple roles within the period strand, shifting identities across years. The performance mode favors caricature over naturalism.

Outrageous accents and an intentionally hammed-up delivery define many scenes, and this approach produces striking comic and grotesque textures. Exchanges between the two, including sequences set in a jail, provide several of the film’s sharpest acting moments.

Friction between an actor and “the filmmaker” operates as a primary thematic device. Scenes often split open as characters debate lines or motivation, with someone calling “cut” mid-beat. That pattern of interruption turns the film set into part of the fiction.

Reality and staged fantasy mingle, and the arguments over method become a running commentary on authorship. The father–son presence gives the experiment a human axis across both planes, and their shared screen time supplies feeling even as the structure stays abstract. Actress Kansas Bowling appears briefly and adds another face to the rotating cast of figures orbiting the project.

The Event as Artistic Statement

Access to the film remains strictly limited to Glover’s touring presentation. That choice protects a shared room experience and reframes a screening as a total artwork. The evening opens with a substantial performance in which Glover reads from his self-published books, including RAT CATCHING, often paired with a Magic Lantern slideshow. The hour serves a narrative function. It tunes the audience to the director’s cadence and ideas before the projector rolls, and it teaches the rules the film will play by.

After the credits, the room shifts into an unmoderated, long-form Q&A. Glover gives the audience time, often for an hour or more. Responses can stretch and wander, yet they keep attention because they extend the night’s guiding concerns: process, intention, and the strange mechanics of making art in front of people.

The combined program shapes a singular theatrical experience. The live reading sets the terms, the film performs those terms on screen, and the conversation folds the audience into the method. The evening raises the perceived value of the project through context and presence, and the package encourages a view of Glover as a cinematic auteur whose process is the point of entry.

No! You’re Wrong. or: Spooky Action at a Distance is a 2025 American film written, edited, produced, and directed by Crispin Glover. It premiered at the Museum of Modern Art on October 2, 2025. The film’s theatrical distribution is highly unconventional; like his two previous directorial works, Glover only screens the movie as part of a touring event that includes a live performance, a question-and-answer session, and a meet-and-greet/book signing. The film is therefore not available on standard streaming services or through conventional home video release.

Credits

Title: No! You’re Wrong. or: Spooky Action at a Distance

Distributor: Volcanic Eruptions

Release date: October 2, 2025 (Museum of Modern Art)

Rating: Not Rated

Running time: 85 minutes

Director: Crispin Hellion Glover

Writers: Crispin Hellion Glover, Bruce Glover, Mike Pallagi

Producers and Executive Producers: Crispin Hellion Glover

Cast: Bruce Glover, Crispin Hellion Glover, Mika Mae Jones, Kansas Bowling, David Brotherton, David Lynch

Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Kai Miedendorp

Editors: Crispin Hellion Glover

Composer: Charlotte Kemp Muhl