“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gaze also into you”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Eli is lost, hoping to find purpose and perspective following the charismatic Vance Kincaid and his rules for success. Lured off the grid with the promise of enlightenment, Eli must confront the allegations of Kincaid's torture of his own recruits, as police investigate the body count of many other Kincaid followers. Loyalists dismiss the allegations, calling victims suicides, but Kincaid goes into hiding to avoid the spotlight.
Looking behind the curtain, Eli becomes more entangled in Kincaid's web, but has gazed into the abyss too long to turn away. Now the abyss gazes into Eli. Recruits to Kincaid's program are deprived of sleep and food, tasked with helping to create content for Kincaid's sermon-like podcasts from the retreat mansion. Older followers push recruits to follow the rules, the program, the system.
Inspired by trends of toxic masculinity gaining traction on social media, TOXIC asks the question: what happens when we rely on charismatic leaders to reshape us when we’re most vulnerable? A surreal exploration of the underside of consumerism and contemporary cults of personality, TOXIC holds a mirror up to the world in an age of uncertainty, hysterical political strongmen, and self-appointed prophets.
If you gaze into the abyss for long enough, it becomes ... TOXIC.
JWP’s latest work, TOXIC: Into The Abyss, dives headlong into the cult-like waters of lifestyle influencers across social media who metamorphosize into demagogues. With a portfolio of independent features and short films, JWP occupies the space between philosophy and cinema as an artistic, psychological, and spiritual laboratory.
From “Walk Away Clean” (2023), a hardboiled crime short that earned him Best Director at the Chicago Indie Film Awards, to “Friends In Deed” (2021), a dramatic exploration of loyalty and enduring friendship that won accolades from Toronto Indie Fest to the Roma Short Fest, JWP’s work is driven by an unpretentious seriousness the same way one of his earliest films, “Limits” (2007), stared down a new America in the wake of Enron’s collapse.
These aren’t just films; they’re arguments with the world, shaped frame by frame. JWP’s background in literature and philosophy is less a sideline than an engine — he’s as likely to quote Baldwin in a screenplay as he is to stage a shot like Tarkovsky in Los Angeles.
But “TOXIC” marks his most personal project to date: an ensemble vision forged in a new reality shaped by social media and shot through with the urgency of the present.
If the abyss is near, JWP’s camera doesn’t blink.