Review: ‘Loafers’ revives the Chicago tradition of the no-budget hangout movie
2001 / Dir. Zach Schnitzer / 2026 Chicago Critics Film Festival
Rating: 3/5
Watch if you like: Early Joe Swanberg and Duplass Brothers, being an early twentysomething living in a Chicago brownstone and getting drunk with your friends, taking long walks down alleys as people throw out their trash.
Filmed for no money in 11 days by a bunch of young twentysomethings, DePaul grad Zach Schnitzer’s debut feature, which he also wrote and stars in, will remind many of the early days of mumblecore, particularly fellow Chicagoan Joe Swanberg (who even makes a hilarious cameo).
Isaac (Schnitzer) and Cameron (Dan Haller) are two roommates with a clear, long-standing friendship that starts to drift apart. Cameron’s working as a waiter, not making it as an actor, can’t escape his ex’s new relationship since she’s still part of the friend group, and is becoming that guy who’s still drinking vodka out of a plastic water bottle after college. Meanwhile, Isaac, after a silly post-glass bong-smashing ritual injury and tensions with his friend Cyrus (Olemich Tugas), who needs to get off their couch and find his own apartment, finds himself going off on his own romantic adventure.
In true mumblecore fashion, there’s some wonky camerawork and jumpy editing here—I’m sure a product of the lack of budget and a bare-bones crew. Likewise, the script tries to do way too much, losing focus by giving all of Isaac and Cameron’s friends full character arcs and by interjecting a third-act dramatic shift that Loafers doesn’t have the space to handle properly. On the flip side of the mumblecore coin, there are genuine truths revealed about what it means to be a young person figuring it out, truly on your own for the first time. And certain parts of an uncohesive whole I found quite touching and effective, like the developing relationship between Isaac and Q (Ruby Sevcik) that I could have watched a whole movie about.
While I think this movie has a lot of issues, I’m simultaneously deeply impressed by what they accomplished without any resources. We live in an era where you can find hundreds of garbage Tubi “movies” filmed on phones in Airbnbs that are utterly alien to any recognizable human experience, and Loafers seems like just the starting line for many talented people. More importantly, watching this was a reminder that you don’t need to have a ton of money to make art. If you have a story to tell, grab your friends and make something that’s pure and true to you.