Making its Northern UK premiere at Grimmfest 2025 was satirical horror comedy, Kombucha. The film, directed by Jake Myers, is about exactly what you might expect from the title, sinister kombucha. It is also an over-the-top, comic-take on office culture and trying to make it as a creative in a capitalist society. At Grimmfest, I spoke to director Jake Myers and star Paige Bourne about the film.
Myers starts by giving me a beautifully succinct description of what the film is about. “Kombucha’s about a drink that makes people work themselves to death at a company.” “Why not try and keep it as short as possible?” he says. The film’s other elevator pitch log-line is David Cronenberg meets office space, less literal than what Myers offers but hints more at the film’s comedic tone.
It is obviously pressing to discuss the drink itself. “I think kombucha is like the new coffee in start-up culture, especially in America on the coast. Like, tech start-ups will have kombucha on tap,” he tells me, but also that “it transforms the chemistry of whatever it’s sitting is the SCOBY [Symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast] does“.
For Myers and screenwriter Geoff Bakken, the drink is there as a perfect symbol for both corporate culture in the US and an off-putting horror tool. “It’s all these live cultures that you put in your body and that change you biologically. It’s a compellingly horrific angle on the drink that makes it seem like something that Cronenberg might have come up with himself.”
We then talk about influences. I offer up Alex Garland’s FX series Devs as something that visually aligns with the film, which Myers was delighted by. “That was exactly what we went for. No way. Like, Devs was in the slideshow, the pitch deck that we had for our camera department. Devs was a huge influence for the look of the film because we wanted to elevate it beyond the aesthetic of a B movie.”
In fact, the Garland influence runs deeper than just that. Bourne says that the film she is drawing from for most of her performance is Ex Machina. “When we were preparing, Ex Machina is what we talked about a lot, just to get the tone right – because I mean the plot is insane, our big bad is like sentient bacteria and that could have gone very badly treating it really seriously and not like leaning into like jokiness in the humour, but really leaning into the anxiety, and letting the humour come from the release of that anxiety was really essential.”
Any horror-comedy has the tricky job of tone management. Myers talks about how one of the ways he tries to keep it under control is letting the horror be scary and have the comedy come from the corporate satire. “The focus on some of the corporate lingo, when you put a spotlight on this thing that has been normalized […] it makes it feel weird. It makes the familiar ridiculous.”
The office setting for Myers is also what grounds the film. “I listened to an interview with Jordan Peele and he said, What makes Get Out work is that everyone can relate to it because everyone has this intense fear of meeting their partner’s parents for the first time. It is this relatable hook. And I think that what makes kombucha work is I think so many people have a fear of not finding purpose, a fear of starting a new job, a fear of losing that job, and the fear of, yeah, letting that job ferment you, into something that you no longer like.”
The mention of Jordan Peele seems like a pertinent one, as the film draws many of its actors from the Chicago comedy scene. “Comedic actors are so good at, number one, buying into a big concept and being like, yeah, all right, I’m on board with this,” Bourne tells me. “[they’re] attuned to understanding when it’s appropriate to kind of give a little wink at the audience of when something comedic is happening and when it’s not, and we need to just lean into the horror elements of it.”
The Kombucha itself is not the only bad of the film. Without spoilers, there is a creature in the film pulling the screens, which given the low-budget nature of the film I was surprised to see. Whilst it seems pretty seamless, Myers tells me it was anything but behind-the-scenes.
“We were going to do the entire thing practically, but it didn’t work. The prop arrived late, we needed it a few days earlier and because of how tight the schedule was we just couldn’t fix it. I hope I didn’t show it on set, but I just wept the entire ride home that day. But I called my friend Kyle from Third Beacon [a Chicago VFX company], and I told him about the setup, and I said, Can we do X, Y, and Z? Because I’ve worked in VFX before, I was like, I think we can fix this. And to his credit, he said, let’s make it happen. So I hopped on the assembly line, let him take the lead, and I feel like we were able to pull off a big bad that didn’t ruin the film.”
I asked Bourne if the lack of practical effects made the acting process harder. “It was tough,” she replied, to a knowing laugh from Myers. Although the studio space itself helped, Bourne explained. “It’s like video panels on the ceiling and all the walls around you. And doing that instead of a green screen was so helpful to get an idea of… how is this room? How creepy is it? As opposed to just like, well, try to explain this to me as you pretend to act against absolutely nothing.”
The aspect of the film that came more naturally was the idea of struggling to balance artistic goals with corporate interests. “The audition scene that I was sent was Luke [Terrence Carey] and Elise’s [Bourne] breakup scene from the beginning of the movie” – a scene where the two central character’s relationship falls apart over the tension between pursuing music and being financially stable.
“I understood their whole dynamic immediately, because I’ve had almost the same conversation in my own personal life of like, yes, I have these intangible creative dreams and desires, but I also have even more tangible bills to pay at the end of the day. And so this really tapped into the horror of like how much of myself am I willing to sell and give up to a corporate job so that I can continue to fund the dreams I would much rather be pursuing?”
To round-up, the pair told me what was next in store. Bourne tells me she has a lot of indie projects around Chicago on the go, and Myers is directing a slasher next year about “a woman that hunts down the guys who developed a dating app using their own dating app.” He also hints at a Kombucha sequel that is “in the works.”
Kombucha will be available to stream later this year in the UK.
