Acetone Helps
A Case Study of Puke Bitch - Episode One: "Acetone" (2026)
Written by Joshua Allen
Founder and Executive Director, The Atlantis Awards
“A photograph does not mean the same thing every time somebody takes one. In Puke Bitch, familiar actions return under different conditions, and the person on the receiving end changes what we are watching.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. They examine the specific filmmaking mechanisms that make a work function, how those mechanisms are constructed across departments, and what another filmmaker might learn from them.
Content notice: This study discusses explicit anatomical imagery, sexual situations involving teenage characters, bodily distress, disturbing treatment of a dead animal, nonconsensual photography, underage alcohol purchase and consumption, and strangulation. It contains complete spoilers for the pilot.
Before We Know Their Names
An older woman in her underwear straddles someone lying motionless on a couch. Wearing gloves, she works on the other person’s fingernails, removing the polish. Then she raises a Polaroid camera and takes a photograph.
The arrangement is disturbing before it is comprehensible. One person is doing everything; the other does not respond. We may already suspect violence, but suspicion cannot supply the missing relationship, the circumstances that brought these people together, or what the motionless woman might have said before the camera arrived. The opening makes an action visible while withholding the encounter that would allow us to understand it.
Sam Tricomo’s pilot, subtitled “Acetone,” moves from this room into the lives of teenage twins Dove and Larry Marvel, their foster mother Lynn, and their older neighbor Janet. These relationships unfold through medical appointments, parties, church preparations, shopping, and encounters that become more troubling as we learn what the participants want. The official series material identifies the family relationships, but the pilot seldom stops to have its characters explain them. It gives them things to do together.
That distinction matters because many of those things will happen again. Someone will take another photograph, touch another person, offer help, or decide whether a rule should apply. Each action remains recognizable, but recognition will not be enough to tell us what it means.
For now, the woman has taken her picture. The film leaves before we can ask the person in it.
Hang in There
Dove is in a school bathroom stall, looking down at blood in her underwear. Larry waits for her, and Lynn comes to collect them. During the drive to the gynecologist, the twins hold hands across the seat. At the medical appointment, Dove reaches for Lynn’s hand before the examination begins.
These gestures establish different forms of access to the same person. Larry can accompany her without requiring a report. Lynn can be sought for reassurance even while the situation makes Dove visibly anxious. The doctor receives a different kind of access altogether, and the film presents the examination with a direct anatomical image rather than substituting a reaction shot.
The bluntness is unmistakable, but its function is more particular than a general commitment to showing everything. In an interview with The Fan Carpet, Tricomo describes the exposed body as something that need not automatically become sexual: “It’s not sexual, it’s just a body.” That is his stated distinction, not a guarantee of how every viewer will experience the image. What the scene demonstrably does is decline to make embarrassment the limit of the camera’s access.
The next significant omission complicates that apparent openness. After the appointment, Lynn stops the car and asks Larry to give them a moment. He gets out, leaving Dove in the back seat. Dove looks apprehensive, the moment settles into quiet, and the film cuts away before the conversation begins.
The examination was available to us; this conversation is not. We have seen an intimate part of Dove’s body without being admitted to everything that might explain her circumstances. Physical exposure has not become complete narrative access.
That separation is important to the film’s larger construction. A visible body is not necessarily a legible person, and an explicit image does not automatically answer the question it raises. The pilot is willing to show us something uncomfortable and still leave us uncertain about what surrounds it.
Larry Is Not Taking Turns
Larry’s contribution to the appointment includes an obscene joke delivered on his phone. Dove gives him a light shove, then settles against his shoulder. Her response is doing more than confirming that the joke landed: it establishes the room available for teasing inside this relationship, where irritation and affection can occupy the same movement.
Later, Larry helps with her eye makeup. He raises a mirror so she can inspect the result, waits for her response, then joins her beside the bed. The sequence gives the activity a small but complete structure: he does something to her appearance, she gets to assess it, and the interaction ends in physical closeness.
Brandon Engel makes this look habitual rather than exemplary. Larry is not performing a special act of kindness so that the audience will approve of him. Nor does Jaclyn Iskow receive the attention as though the film has just invented a touching scene. The ease between them suggests that this is one of the ordinary ways they occupy each other’s space.
That ease remains when they prepare to go out. Passing Lynn asleep on the couch, Larry takes a photograph of her. The action is casual, but it also quietly returns us to something from the opening: an alert person makes an image of someone who is not participating in that decision at that moment. The resemblance deserves attention without requiring us to pretend that photographing a sleeping parent and photographing the opening’s motionless woman are already the same event.
At the party, the twins’ social positions diverge. Larry is surrounded; Dove is framed alone. Yet he notices her across the room, gives her a deliberately hangdog look, and comes over to ask whether she is okay. He does not suddenly become solemn in order to care about her. The check-in belongs to the same person who immediately announces his intention to leave with other partygoers and bluntly rejects the suggestion that Dove should join them.
This is where “bisexual bad boy” becomes an inadequate description of the performance. It identifies a readily available type but misses the relationship that makes Larry specific. His affection is not a corrective applied after his vulgarity, and his brashness is not a costume he removes when Dove needs him.
Engel’s achievement is integration. The teasing, concern, physical confidence, impatience, and sweetness feel as though they originate in one person rather than taking turns at the front of the performance. We do not simply understand that Larry loves his sister; we understand why his presence might make an unpleasant day more bearable.
That does not make him safe in every relationship. It makes the differences between those relationships worth watching.
Someone Else's Headphones
Dove leaves the party alone and steps on something in the dark. Her phone’s flashlight reveals a dead cat. Before the film shows us what she will do with that discovery, it returns to the older woman from the opening, now painting her own toenails.
A distorted rendition of “God Save the King” accompanies her. The music carries into the bar sequence, then recedes when she removes her headphones. What initially reaches us as an intrusive musical presence becomes more specifically located: we have been listening with her.
Ben Fox Smith’s released score identifies the cue as “Bar – God Save the King.” That provides an attribution for the music without requiring us to assign a single symbolic meaning to the anthem. The observable filmmaking choice is the change in acoustic perspective, which gives the sound a character relationship after we have already been experiencing it.
At the bar, we learn the woman’s name is Janet. Another woman tries to engage her, remarking that Janet shares a name with her mother. Janet offers little in return. Kimberly Cruchon Brooks lets the encounter remain awkward without immediately clarifying whether the distance comes from disinterest, discomfort, distraction, or something else.
A separate exchange plays softly beyond the main interaction. The bartender asks a customer for identification, and the customer struggles to produce it. Janet eventually moves away from her conversation and offers a ride.
The ID requirement does not arrive with the emphasis of an important clue. It belongs to the ordinary business of the room, briefly becoming relevant because Janet notices it. We understand the immediate obstacle without receiving a speech about age, access, or institutional responsibility.
That modest presentation gives the detail somewhere to go later. For the moment, it simply helps explain why Janet’s attention has shifted.
What Seeing Does Not Settle
Dove returns home, showers, and sits with the dead cat on her desk. She turns a knife in her hands and draws it lightly along the body without a clearly visible incision. She leans close, smells it, then lowers her face toward it as a brief sucking sound adds another disturbing piece of information.
The scene gives us enough to be unsettled without making every aspect of the contact incontrovertible. Its duration prevents us from dismissing the encounter as a quick grotesque insert, but duration is not the same thing as clarification. We are required to remain with Dove’s attention while her exact purpose stays difficult to name.
This is a useful correction to the medical sequence. The pilot’s willingness to show anatomy does not amount to a universal rule that every bodily action will be fully demonstrated. Here, image and sound supply different portions of the encounter, and the viewer must negotiate the space between them.
That uncertainty should not be filled with a more definite act merely because a definite act would be easier to discuss. The film has shown Dove’s fascination, the animal’s condition, the knife, and an intimate proximity to the body. What those elements establish is already disturbing; an interpretation does not become more rigorous by adding something the presentation does not clearly prove.
The next morning returns us to a different bodily problem. Larry is brushing his teeth in Dove’s room when she wakes and discovers that she has been bleeding again. He immediately offers to get Lynn. Dove tells him to get out, and he leaves.
The response is brief, but it establishes something concrete. Larry’s familiarity with Dove does not prevent him from recognizing that she now wants privacy. A person who was allowed to help with her makeup, lean against her, and joke about her appointment can also be asked to leave.
The earlier access has not become permanent permission.
A Picture She Did Not Ask For
At church, Larry approaches Elizabeth, who takes him aside and measures his waist. Their banter suggests an existing routine, but the pilot does not supply its history. Kelley Holcomb’s performance keeps the exchange unstable, with practical activity, familiarity, and discomfort sharing the same space.
Larry takes a photograph of her without asking. She objects, and he dismisses the objection rather than treating it as a reason to stop. He then takes her hand and places it against his chest. Elizabeth withdraws and redirects him toward the basement candles.
The encounter is not reducible to a simple contest in which the most forward person necessarily holds all the power. Elizabeth is an adult religious authority; Larry is a teenager. Who initiates a particular movement and who occupies the more powerful position in the broader relationship are separate questions, and the scene does not give us enough history to settle everything between them.
It does, however, give us a clear contrast with the preceding bedroom scene. Dove asked Larry to leave, and he left. Elizabeth objects to being photographed, and he keeps the image. His ability to recognize a boundary in one relationship has not made his response consistent across another.
In the basement, he uses the photograph sexually before returning upstairs to carry candles in the service. The image has acquired a use Elizabeth was not invited to choose, and the film has located that use in another room of the same building. The geography allows the public role and private behavior to coexist without requiring Larry to explain the contradiction.
Photography has now appeared in three different circumstances. The opening subject was motionless, Lynn was asleep, and Elizabeth was awake enough to object. The recurrence becomes more informative as those differences accumulate: the shutter is the familiar action, but the person in front of it has a different capacity to participate each time.
This is not an arithmetic exercise in which every photograph receives an equal amount of blame. It is a way of making the circumstances around an apparently simple act increasingly difficult to ignore.
"And You Did. Why?"
When Dove arrives at church, another altar boy compliments her dress. She answers with “Suck it,” and he replies, “Amen.” The exchange gives the setting its irreverent social texture without stopping the preparations or requiring anyone to step outside the language they already share.
Larry intercepts Dove and asks whether she is okay. Then he suggests asking God for a thousand tampons. The obscenity does not replace the concern; it is the form his concern takes once he knows she can answer him.
Elizabeth’s subsequent sermon offers a much more formal account of attending to another person. Retelling the story of Jairus’s daughter, she emphasizes Christ’s response to distress and his concern that the girl be given something to eat. Empathy becomes the explicit subject of the speech.
Dove is preoccupied with her nail polish. She worries at it, looks around, notices Janet, and is noticed in return. Then she leaves the service. In the bathroom, she is still trying to remove the polish when Janet takes the neighboring sink.
“Acetone helps,” Janet says. After Dove asks her to repeat herself, Janet shows her own nails and adds that the polish does not seem like something Dove would wear. Dove says Lynn asked her to, and Janet answers with the question that makes the exchange more than practical advice: “And you did. Why?”
Dove shrugs. Janet returns the shrug and leaves, allowing the question to remain unanswered. The scene does not make Dove explain her relationship with Lynn, define her appearance, or deliver a statement about personal freedom before she can continue washing her hands.
Nor does the exchange prove that Lynn forced her to wear the polish. It establishes a request, Dove’s compliance, and her present desire to remove the result. Janet recognizes the mismatch between the appearance and the behavior without being granted complete authority over what caused it.
The placement after the sermon is nevertheless pointed. Elizabeth has described empathy through a religious narrative; Janet performs a small act of perception. She notices what Dove is struggling with and offers information that might help.
Tricomo has described a related concern in his approach to the characters. Speaking to The Fan Carpet, he says, “These characters aren’t empathetic,” followed by the need “to film them with empathy.” The interview also describes his work with cinematographer Reynard Lee in moving toward a more grounded visual approach rather than exaggerated quirkiness. That is a statement of intention, not an instruction to excuse everyone the film observes.
The bathroom scene demonstrates why the distinction matters. Janet can accurately perceive another person’s discomfort and offer a useful response. That action counts, but it does not certify the whole person. The film allows a moment of recognition to remain real without making it a guarantee about every other encounter Janet will have.
Her Own ID
After the service, Larry and the other altar boy, Nate, count the collection money. Their conversation about seeing each other later becomes a negotiation, with Larry asking that the arrangement remain mutually beneficial. Nate takes money from the collection and slips it into Larry’s shirt.
The exchange is ethically untidy, but its immediate behavior differs from the encounter with Elizabeth. Both young men contribute to the negotiation, and Nate answers Larry’s condition with an action of his own. We are watching another form of participation rather than a replay with interchangeable recipients.
The next scene places Larry back beside Dove, pushing a shopping cart. She selects a bottle of acetone and tosses it to him. After the church’s various exchanges, the movement is almost aggressively practical: she has been given useful advice and is obtaining the thing she needs.
That purchase matters more than an abstract declaration that Dove is reclaiming herself. The film has shown a problem, a proposed solution, and an action taken in response. She wants the polish off, and she now has a means of removing it. The object becomes useful to her before it becomes useful to an interpretation.
Janet is at the checkout. Among the twins’ purchases is a bottle of vodka. She considers it, considers them, and scans her own ID without an explanatory word.
The earlier bar scene now has a second function. There, Janet observed an identification requirement being enforced against someone else. Here, she occupies the position from which the transaction can be allowed through, and she supplies the credential herself.
The role has changed, not the basic procedure. A requirement that obstructed one encounter becomes something Janet chooses to bypass in another. Because the pilot has already shown the first version as ordinary activity, it does not need a second explanation of what an ID is doing in the scene.
This is one of the clearest examples of how Puke Bitch reduces its dependence on dialogue. The earlier exchange establishes a practical relationship between an object and access. The later exchange changes Janet’s position within that relationship, and her silent action carries the difference.
Dove’s small acknowledgment before leaving extends the connection made in the bathroom. Later, the woman from the bar approaches Janet while she is stocking a cooler. Their awkward encounter includes an abruptly delivered gallon of milk, an apology, and an agreement that the earlier conversation went badly on both sides.
These are not polished expressions of intimacy. They are small adjustments that allow another encounter to become possible. Janet remains brusque even while making room for it.
Resemblance Is Not Equivalence
By now, the repetitions are substantial enough to suggest more than a collection of recurring props. Photographs return with different forms of participation. Acetone moves from an unexplained activity to practical advice and a chosen purchase. An ID requirement returns with Janet on the other side of the transaction, while gestures of touch and short questions acquire meaning from the relationships in which they occur.
The operative device is not simply repetition. It is repetition that preserves enough of an action for us to recognize it while changing something consequential around it. The second instance gives the first one more work to do, without necessarily revealing that the first was a trick.
That last distinction is important. The bar’s ID check already functions as a small obstacle within the scene. Larry’s photograph of Lynn already belongs to his teasing relationship with her. The details do not have to sit inertly on the screen, waiting for the audience to discover that they were clues.
There is a limit to what the pattern can responsibly explain. Dove’s encounter with the cat does not become equivalent to another character’s violence simply because both involve an unresponsive body. A sleeping person, an objecting person, and a person who has been rendered unable to respond are not interchangeable states.
The useful lesson is therefore more demanding than “repeat your imagery.” Give the action a complete function where it first appears, then change a condition that matters when it returns. Performance must make the response legible, framing must preserve what we need to notice, and editing must allow the connection without erasing the difference.
Tricomo’s credits as writer, director, and editor place him across several stages where those relationships could have been developed. NFFTY’s program record confirms those roles, but it does not tell us whether each echo originated in the screenplay, on set, or in the edit. The finished construction is available for analysis without inventing its production history.
She Heard Her
Outside a pool hall, Nate collapses. Larry immediately gets down to help, struggles with his weight, and calls Dove over when he cannot manage alone. His concern has become an awkward physical task rather than another charming line.
Engel does not announce a newly responsible Larry to carry it out. The same impatient, playful person is trying to get someone off the ground. Once again, care does not require the performance to change personalities.
The film then returns to Janet and the woman from the bar. Over drinks, the younger woman asks when Janet intends to ask her name. It is Tori, and their next encounter takes place on Janet’s couch.
During their intimacy, Janet pulls back. Tori asks, “You okay?” and places a hand against her chest, waiting rather than pushing the encounter onward. Janet holds the hand there, moves it in front of her, examines it, and finally presses it to her cheek.
The familiar question has entered another relationship, but the words do not carry the whole exchange. Touch is being offered, received, and redirected through a sequence in which both people remain present, its meaning carried by waiting, hesitation, and the changing placement of the hand rather than by anything said aloud.
The soundtrack swells into something briefly monstrous, then settles. It marks a disturbance without supplying a diagnostic explanation or a flashback that would make Janet’s reaction easy to classify. The finished effect gives us a change in the encounter’s felt reality, not a complete account of its cause.
Janet reaches toward Tori’s face, then her neck. Tori asks her not to continue the neck contact. Janet backs away.
That interruption is essential to the scene’s construction. It shows a boundary becoming perceptible and producing a response. Tori has not simply displayed a gesture the audience must debate after the fact; she has communicated a limit, and Janet’s withdrawal demonstrates that the communication reached her.
Janet then resumes contact and returns both hands to Tori’s throat. Tori panics, and Janet continues until she stops responding. The scene gives us a sequence of offer, hesitation, objection, apparent compliance, and deliberate violation.
Its horror depends upon those distinctions remaining readable. Removing the first withdrawal would alter the evidence: the scene would no longer show Janet’s temporary response to the boundary before she crossed it again. The pause is not empty space between two actions; it changes our understanding of the second one.
Acetone Helps
Janet goes to the bathroom and retrieves a bottle of acetone. Back at the couch, she removes Tori’s nail polish. We have returned to the situation that opened the episode, but we now carry an encounter into it.
The return does not depend upon every viewer having mistaken Tori for someone asleep. Violence may have seemed likely from the first image. What was missing was more specific: Tori’s attention to Janet, the offered hand, the spoken boundary, Janet’s withdrawal, and the decision to resume.
The opening’s motionless person now has a name and a voice we remember. The absence of response is no longer simply an unexplained condition in a strange composition. We have watched that response become impossible.
Acetone has also changed its relationship to the person whose nails are being cleaned. Dove wanted her polish removed and obtained the means to do it. Tori is given no comparable opportunity to decide.
The material has not acquired a new chemical property. The action has acquired a different distribution of control. Something that could help Dove act on her own preference becomes something Janet uses to determine another person’s appearance after that person can no longer intervene.
That is more specific than treating acetone as a universal symbol for stripping away identity. The film has shown that removal can itself be wanted. What matters is not whether the polish stays or goes, but whose preference the action serves and whether the person receiving it can answer.
Janet raises the Polaroid. The flash links her image-making to Dove holding another camera, transferring the act across the cut. The following bedroom view gathers Dove and the boys on the bed.
This is where editing makes the comparison explicit. The photographs have already returned in different circumstances, but now the pilot places two acts of taking a picture in immediate relation. We do not have to remember a small piece of business from twenty minutes earlier; the cut hands the action from one scene to the next.
It does not hand down an equal verdict on the photographers. The boys’ situation is not Tori’s, and the brief bedroom passage does not give us an identical account of every subject’s awareness or permission. To declare Dove guilty of the same violation would ignore precisely the contextual differences the episode has made important.
Nor does the ending require us to imagine what the photograph might do in a future episode. Its present function is already available: an act that has become horrifying in Janet’s hands remains possible in someone else’s. The camera itself cannot settle the difference.
Dove lowers hers, and the film gives us the room beyond the picture. After Janet’s couch, the people on the other side of a lens are no longer merely its subjects; their ability to remain participants has become something we look for.
The flash makes the acts resemble each other, and the wider view makes us examine what the resemblance leaves out.
A Note on Sourcing: The primary source is the screened pilot, supported by chronological viewing notes and selective visual checks; this is the highest of the five evidentiary tiers this process works from — released work via direct viewing, then documented production fact (credits, technical records, festival listings), then filmmaker commentary, then performer/participant commentary, then Atlantis’s own interpretation. Stated filmmaker or participant intent is not treated as proof of what the finished pilot actually achieves — Tricomo’s Fan Carpet remarks on empathy and the body are used here as context for his aims, not as confirmation of this essay’s own reading. The copied transcript used during viewing served as a navigation aid rather than an authority over the soundtrack, and uncertain wording has been paraphrased rather than promoted into a definitive quotation.
The recurring-action argument — “same action, different hands,” the reading of acetone, the ID reversal, the photograph’s recurrence — is Atlantis’s own interpretation of the finished work. It is not presented as Tricomo’s own terminology, and the essay does not attribute specific gestures, prop choices, or transitions to improvisation, screenplay instructions, or particular production decisions without evidence.
Sources and Research
- Puke Bitch, dir. Sam Tricomo — direct viewing (puke_bitch___episode_1 (540p).mp4, 38:34), the primary source for this essay’s argument.
- Official production site, pukebitchseries.com — cast/crew credits, title gloss.
- Slamdance Film Festival, official 2026 lineup listing (slamdance.com) — cast/crew/producer credits, festival programming category.
- NFFTY (nffty.org/puke-bitch) — Post-Production Pitch Competition listing, production timeline.
- The Fan Carpet, interview with Sam Tricomo (“It’s Not Sexual, It’s Just a Body…”) — director’s stated intent on the body, empathy, and character approach; verified against the article directly.
- Ben Fox Smith, composer — official soundtrack release Puke Bitch (Original Score) (Bandcamp), identifying the “Bar – God Save the King” cue and independently corroborating the SeriesFest selection.
- Reynard Lee, cinematographer — project page confirming camera/lens/format specifications and festival selections (Slamdance, NFFTY, SeriesFest).
- IMDb, full cast page, and the pilot’s own on-screen end credits (0:37:32) — direct confirmation of the complete cast list, resolving the Holcomb/Kiefer casting question below.
- IndieX Film Fest (indiexfest.com) — official award-winners and nominee pages, confirming the August 2025 and 2026 Annual Awards honors named above.
- Film Threat, review by Michael Talbot-Haynes (Feb 26, 2026) — consulted for existing critical discussion of how later information reframes the characters; not otherwise drawn on for scene description, which stays grounded in direct viewing.