The rain-slicked streets of Portland, Oregon, sit in the background like a quiet witness to Beth’s stalled home life. She works as a realtor, yet her attention keeps drifting toward an earlier sense of self that feels out of reach. The marriage has lost its old spark. Steve dominates their home with a belligerent energy that drains Beth to the point of constant fatigue.
Across town, Jeremy, a seventeen-year-old student, is still raw from a recent breakup. He retreats into vinyl records, treating his collection like a small refuge he can control. A chance meeting at Future Shock Records brings these two strangers into the same frame. They bump into each other while flipping through old albums and lock onto the same affection for retro sounds.
The moment plays as gentle and almost harmless, a connection formed through nostalgia and a shared craving to register as real to someone else. The film places this trio in separate pockets of isolation, then starts tightening the threads. Portland’s damp grey mood presses in, mirroring the characters’ quiet desperation and making the setting feel inseparable from their choices.
The Rituals of Turntable Intimacy
Beth and Jeremy’s relationship slides from music fandom into physical and emotional danger. Briana Ratterman plays Beth as someone improvising her life in real time, inventing new rules with each step. Her flirtation lands with awkward force, carrying a predatory edge alongside a deep sadness that never fully leaves her face.
Lucas Friedman gives Jeremy the wide-eyed confusion of a teenager who cannot process becoming the focus of a grown woman’s desire. He leans on what he has, his knowledge of indie tracks and poetic fragments, using them like tools to impress her. The attention grants him a kind of pride he does not find among his peers.
The act of putting a record on the turntable becomes their shared ritual. They listen. They talk. They end up dancing, turning Beth’s apartment into a sealed-off sanctuary where the outside world feels temporarily muted. The bond works in a transactional way for both of them. Beth reaches for a zest for life she believes she has lost, treating Jeremy as a shortcut back to feeling awake. Jeremy absorbs the confidence that comes from being wanted, especially after rejection from his high school sweetheart.
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The film forces the fantasy to meet daylight during a high school swim meet. Beth appears in the stands among other parents, and the age gap becomes impossible to ignore in plain view. The scene turns the relationship into a visible transgression, not a private story the two of them can keep aesthetic and controlled. Their connection runs on curiosity, and that curiosity keeps pushing past social consequences they do not seem equipped to hold. They reach for each other to patch holes their current lives leave open, and the patches keep tearing.
Domestic Static and Hostile Surveillance
Steve’s presence shifts the film’s texture, pulling it away from straightforward drama and into a dark comedy charged by volatility. Matthew Dibiasio plays him with a dangerous current that makes each scene feel like it could snap.
Steve reads as a ticking bomb, and the film gives him small, unnerving habits to show it, like eating dry cereal by hand one piece at a time, a private performance of irritation. Once suspicion of infidelity takes root, he turns into a stalker. He trails Beth and Jeremy through Portland, turning their secrecy into a psychological observation game that he controls by choosing when to appear and when to watch.
Steve refuses the role of a predictable betrayed spouse. He confronts Jeremy at school. He goes to the boy’s mother. Each move manufactures social discomfort, weaponizing everyday spaces that should feel safe or at least neutral. His motives stay murky, and the film keeps that fog in place. He seems to draw a sick satisfaction from holding power on the perimeter, managing the affair like an experiment he can supervise.
The story also refuses clean moral sorting. Steve behaves like a jerk and carries the implication that he might be having his own affair. He also shows flashes of real pain that cut through the performance. When he screams in agony while watching Jeremy’s house, the moment exposes a genuine internal torment that does not fit neatly into villainy.
His erratic choices push the audience into uneasy recalibration around all three characters. The comedy comes from the absurdity of his behavior, and a sinister charge sticks to it at the same time. Steve functions as the catalyst that keeps escalating the mess, driving the relationship toward a confrontation that feels both inevitable and chaotic.
Portland Rhythms and Moral Stasis
Hill’s film operates inside a coming-of-age template familiar across global cinema, stretching from classic American dramas to contemporary European festival entries. That transnational framework matters here because the story keeps bouncing between local specificity and widely recognizable emotional beats: isolation, longing, and the search for identity through another person’s gaze.
Director Daniel M. Hill builds an aesthetic that privileges mood over conventional narrative momentum. Portland is not treated as neutral scenery. The film leans hard on a curated soundtrack of indie bands to stamp a recognizable Portland identity, translating place into sound and letting music function as a kind of shared language between characters who struggle to articulate themselves.
Those songs carry weight beyond background atmosphere. They operate as a bridge between inner worlds, giving Beth and Jeremy a common rhythm they can cling to when ordinary conversation fails. Montages mark the passage of time and underline the emotional stasis trapping the trio. The sequences drift into a surreal register that keeps events feeling unstable and hard to predict, as if reality is bending around their impulsive choices.
The low-budget scale keeps the film contained. The story rarely looks past the immediate orbit of Beth, Jeremy, and Steve, and that narrow focus intensifies the portrait of insecurity and self-sabotage. The film does not steer toward a tidy moral endpoint where consequences deliver wisdom.
The characters remain suspended in uncertainty. Beth stays in a bad marriage after committing a serious transgression. Jeremy walks away without any clear increase in insight. That refusal of a moralizing finish carries a blunt honesty compared to a standard Hollywood ending, presenting people who keep fumbling forward without clean answers. The emotional residue lingers after the screen goes dark, like the last note of a record that keeps spinning in the silence.
Beth + Jeremy and Steve is an independent dark comedy and drama that explores themes of marital stagnation and unconventional connections. After screening at several film festivals, including the Bremen FilmFest and the Santa Fe Film Festival, the movie was officially released on May 30, 2025. Audiences can watch the film on various digital platforms such as VOD, cable, and satellite services, or purchase it on DVD. The story is set and shot entirely in Portland, Oregon, capturing the unique atmospheric and cultural landscape of the Pacific Northwest.
Full Credits
Title: Beth + Jeremy and Steve
Distributor: Freestyle Digital Media
Release date: May 30, 2025
Running time: 91 minutes
Director: Daniel M. Hill
Writers: Daniel M. Hill
Producers and Executive Producers: Evan Gandy, Daniel M. Hill, Pierre Kiecolt-Wahl
Cast: Briana Ratterman, Lucas Friedman, Matthew Dibiasio, Caleb Sohigian, Nancy Lynne, Caroline Hudson
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Michael Pritchard
Editors: Daniel M. Hill
Composer: Mark Savage, Pat Janowski
The Review
Beth + Jeremy and Steve
"Beth + Jeremy and Steve" offers a stark, uncomfortable look at three people stuck in a cycle of poor decisions. The acting is strong. The lead trio makes these deeply flawed characters feel grounded. While the narrative avoids easy resolutions, the lack of growth leaves the experience feeling somewhat stagnant. It captures a specific mood of Pacific Northwest alienation but struggles to find a clear purpose beyond its own cynicism.
PROS
- Authentic acting by the lead cast.
- Evocative use of the Oregon setting.
- Memorable soundtrack choices.
CONS
- Inconsistent character logic for the husband.
- Repetitive narrative beats in the final act.
- Lack of emotional resolution.
