Room Temperature
January 28, 2026
7:30pm | SIFF Film Center
Presented by Grand Illusion Cinema
Room Temperature marks the third feature film collaboration between the iconic cult writer Dennis Cooper and visual artist Zac Farley, offering up a uniquely uncanny and distressing portrait of American life. Set against the barren sprawl of the California desert, the film follows a family’s annual tradition of transforming their home into a DIY haunted house—an increasingly unhinged ritual now hijacked by the father’s obsessive vision.
SIFF year-round passes and vouchers are not valid for this screening.
Though often abrupt and unpredictable in its tonal shifts, Room Temperature‘s twists are always measured and meticulous, aided by Cooper and Farley’s wonderful troupe of non-professional actors who imbue their characters with a mix of drollness and poignance. Hilarious, uncomfortable, and deeply strange, this is haunted-house cinema as poetic autopsy—a slow, disquieting meditation on control, longing, and the fantasies we force onto others.
“Just when you begin hating this film, you’ll suddenly realize—huh? I love it. It’s weird, creepy, and maybe … just maybe, great.”—John Waters
- Director: Dennis Cooper, Zac Farley
- Principal Cast: Charles Nelson Jacobs, John Williams, Ange Dargent, Virginia Adams, Chris Olsen
- Country: USA
- Year: 2025
- Running Time: 92 min.
- Language: English