When we last met the neurotic Upper East Side couple at the center of New Strains (2023), the bickering pair had been lulled into a pandemic-induced domestic bliss, having succumbed to a mysterious virus that turned victims into babbling babies. This week, directing power couple Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan return to the big screen with an even bigger family, adding Shaw’s kooky Greek parents and bouncing baby boy Nico to their stock company. Removal of the Eye (2024) picks up a few years from where New Strains left off, finding Ram and Kallia still in their UES “classic six” while juggling new parenthood, creative aspirations, elder care and—as if that weren’t enough—an ancient curse that may or may not have befallen the happy household.
After a decade of glacial progress on her PhD thesis, Kallia finds ample ways to procrastinate with her new charge, while Ram’s burgeoning Soundcloud rap career is reduced to a makeshift audio studio in an already-packed coat closet. Despite hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, the process of childrearing is reinvented anew in every household. As in New Strains, the pair bump heads at just about every juncture, each fiercely defending their ever-evolving parenting philosophies as they attempt to filter out unwanted advice from neighbors and in-laws. After a rooftop chat with a decidedly bourgeois neighbor dad, Ram becomes fixated on a Dr. Spock-esque “baby optimization” manual, using Nico’s sleep training as an opportunity to take back his free time. But, for all his frustration and bluster, it’s Kallia who seems to bear the brunt of this new arrangement. Between her new baby, flailing husband, and mentally unstable mother just one floor below, Kallia becomes the de facto caregiver of three chaotic dependents. Eager to shake off to the “Old World” superstitions that defined her own childhood, Kallia eschews a traditional Greek baptismal ritual designed to ward off the Evil Eye, unaware that the titular “eye” in question could have made its way in, vampire-like, through the front door. Tempted by the arrival of a magic tech device, in the form of a 360-degree household camera, no jury would convict the harried new mother for seeking solace in surveillance.
Maintaining marital harmony is a bit like owning a classic car: it does well enough on city streets, but can it handle the highway? Parenting accelerates and exacerbates whatever worked—or didn’t!—in a domestic partnership, sending an otherwise well-oiled machine into overdrive, and tossing in its path any number of new challenges and revelations. For Ram and Kallia the addition of Baby Nico puts the pedal-to-the-metal, creating a starkly gendered division of labor rife with comedic possibilities. Building on the absurdist tone and improvisatory style of New Strains, Shaw and Kamalakanthan pull no punches skewering the millennia-old business of care and feeding, plus our own 21st-century obsession with “Building a Better Baby” (to borrow from the film’s creepy fake publication). This ripe satire of the nanny state offers a bit of naptime solace to the screaming, teething toddler in all of us.
Removal of the Eye screens this evening, February 4, at Nitehawk Williamsburg. It will also screen tomorrow, February 5, at Nitehawk Prospect Park and on February 6 at the Roxy. Directors Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan will be in attendance for all screenings.
