"Sour Minnows," the surreal body-snatching comedy from director Harrison Atkins, premiered at Montreal's Fantasia Festival, leaving audiences both baffled and delighted. The film marks Atkins' sophomore feature following his 2015 debut "Lace Crater," and represents a deliberate creative pivot after years of struggling to get a more conventional, bigger-budget project financed in Los Angeles. Atkins told Variety he abandoned that stalled project to write something uncompromising, resulting in a strange, image-driven work he felt compelled to make regardless of commercial prospects.

The film follows roommates Ricky (David Brown) and Tepper (Chase Williamson), who accidentally slip into another plane of existence during a grocery run, triggering bizarre events involving Ricky's girlfriend Aura (Suzanna Son) and a mysterious entity called "The Yellow Thing" that temporarily possesses and "wears" Ricky's skin. Atkins said the script began as an eight-page prose-poem that expanded into an 80-page hybrid of screenplay and poetry, driven by his desire to create cinema that evokes moods and sensations inexpressible in other art forms, citing Edward Hopper's philosophy that painting exists to convey what words cannot.