Kris Rey's "Trash Mountain" arrived in theaters September 11, 2026, carrying a premise that sounds like a punchline and a title that sounds like a put-down. It is neither. The ninety-minute dramedy, released by a Hollywood studio and rated by TMDb at 0/10 on the strength of a still-tiny vote pool, follows a twenty-something gay man named Gavin who leaves Chicago for his rural Missouri hometown after his father dies. Dad was a hoarder, and the house he leaves behind is a maze of objects - some worth real money, most worth nothing but memory. Caleb Hearon plays Gavin, and the film's marketing has leaned on his comic reputation. The movie itself keeps refusing to let him be the joke.
That tension is the story here. "Trash Mountain" is the rare grief comedy that trusts its audience to sit in discomfort without a laugh track, and Hearon - best known for a quick, ironic register that plays beautifully in short bursts - spends most of the runtime doing something slower and stranger. Gavin is not quipping his way through the house. He is sorting. He is negotiating with a dead man through the things a dead man refused to throw away.
A Comic Cast, a Quiet Movie
Rey, whose previous work has shown a sharp eye for messy women and the men who orbit them, assembles an unusual ensemble here. Zooey Deschanel plays Abbi, and Jacki Weaver appears as Helen. Kyle Marvin and Jaboukie Young-White round out the cast. On paper, that lineup promises a certain kind of indie comic energy - the kind that turns a funeral into a set piece. On screen, "Trash Mountain" mostly withholds that. The jokes land, but they land sideways, often when no one on screen is trying to be funny. The funniest moments are frequently the saddest ones, which is either the film's greatest strength or its most frustrating habit, depending on your tolerance for a movie that keeps changing the subject right when you think you have it figured out.
What Rey gets right is the physical reality of hoarding. The house is not a metaphor. It is a production design problem, a logistics problem, and an emotional minefield all at once, and the film treats it that way. Every room requires Gavin to make a decision he is not ready to make: keep, sell, toss, or stand there paralyzed. The screenplay uses that structure to dole out backstory without flashbacks or exposition dumps. You learn who Gavin's father was by what he saved. You learn who Gavin is by what he cannot bring himself to throw away.
The Title Is a Warning
"Trash Mountain" is a blunt title, and the film earns it. The mountain is literal - the accumulated debris of a life - but it is also the pile of unresolved business between a son and a father who never explained himself. Gavin's sexuality is not the plot, which is worth noting in a landscape where queer characters are often handed a coming-out arc whether they need one or not. Here, the queerness is simply part of who Gavin is, and the rural setting is not treated as a threat. The threat is the house. The threat is the silence. The threat is the way grief ambushes you in the cereal aisle.
Hearon's performance has drawn early attention precisely because it inverts expectations. He is not the clown. He is not the emotional support for someone else's story. He is a man alone in a house full of junk, and the film gives him room to be unlikable, petty, exhausted, and occasionally very funny without ever letting the comedy undercut the loss. That balance is hard to strike, and Rey does not always strike it cleanly. Some scenes drift. Some jokes feel like tension-releases the movie did not need. But the cumulative effect is a portrait of grief that feels specific rather than generic - small-town, Midwestern, working-class, and queer without making a spectacle of any of it.
At ninety minutes, "Trash Mountain" is shorter than most films with this much emotional territory to cover, and the runtime shows in places. Characters played by Marvin and Young-White feel underdeveloped, and Abbi's role in Gavin's life could use more screen time than the script gives her. But the film's brevity is also a virtue. It does not overstay. It does not explain. It leaves you with the house, the mountain, and a son who has to decide what to carry forward.
The TMDb rating of 0/10 is meaningless at this stage - it reflects a handful of votes, not a verdict. "Trash Mountain" is now playing in theaters. It is a grief dramedy that refuses to be a crowd-pleaser, and that may be the point. Hearon is not your clown here. He is something harder to watch and harder to forget.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
