It’s Unstreamable! Where Jas Keimig and Chase Burns recommend movies and TV shows you can't watch on major streaming services in the United States. We post every Wednesday unless we’re tired or busy 😊
JAS: In honor of the Barbieheimer blockbuster showdown of the century this weekend, Chase and I have decided to watch an unstreamable movie from both Cillian Murphy and Margot Robbie’s extensive—and weird!— filmography. I’m kicking things off with an extremely emo Irish film featuring a sniveling Murphy right at its center.
CHASE: For my contribution to the Barbieheimer theme, I chose to dig into Margot Robbie’s backlog, hunting for something unstreamable. Most of Robbie’s films are available online, even her feature film debut Vigilante (2008), a poorly received Australian movie about a man who trains himself in “deadly hand-to-hand combat” after his fiancee is raped and murdered. But Robbie’s second feature film, a follow-up from Vigilante’s director, happens to be unstreamable—so that’s what I’m adding to the pile this week. Sorry.
Got a recommendation? Give us the scoop at unstreamablemovies@gmail.com.
Ireland, 2001, 85 min, Dir. John Carney
Within the first five minutes of On the Edge I knew exactly why it’s unstreamable. The Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” played over an early scene. Then “Start” by The Jam. Then “Is She Weird” by Pixies a little later. The soundtrack to this indie Irish film fucking kicks. And weird music licensing is probably the reason it’s not readily available for your Cillian Murphy movie rewatch sessions ahead of that Christopher Nolan movie.
And that’s kind of a bummer because On the Edge is a solid indie movie that features this gif I saw a million times on tumblr back in the 2010s. It follows Jonathan (Murphy), a 19-year-old who tries to kill himself following the death of his alcoholic father. While staying at a psychiatric hospital in Dublin, he meets a cadre of similarly suicidal hotties like the American, Rachel (Tricia Vessey), and sweetie, Toby (Jonathan Jackson). In group therapy, they promise their therapist that they will not off themselves before New Year’s Eve. No spoilers, but you can imagine what happens at the end.
On the Edge is one of the first movies Murphy ever starred in and his low-key star power comes through in the way he casually throws around those icy eyeballs of his. Murphy’s unshowy embodiment of a sardonic character like Jonathan elevates the kinda clunky material into something interesting. He’d go on to star in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later a year after this flick came out, and the rest is history! JAS KEIMIG
Available at Scarecrow Video in the Foreign section under IRELAND.
Australia, 2009, 85 min, Dir. Aash Aaron
"As a performer, [Margot] Robbie always pops onscreen," wrote Manohla Dargis in her Barbie review this week. And it's true. Even in I.C.U., a cheap Australian horror movie, one of Robbie's first movies and maybe also her worst, she manages to pop. As her costars grit and huff to pump up a slow script, she keeps things moving, chillfully. She’s a pro from the start.
I.C.U. follows three unsupervised teens, two boys and a girl, as they spend a vacation lolling around a skyrise apartment building while their dad is away, working or something. The boys spy on their neighbors (no one has blinds) as Robbie's character swims in the apartment's pool. (The movie spends all its time inside this building. It thinks it’s Rear Window.) While doing all that spying, the boys witness some murdering, and eventually, like 50 minutes into this thing, someone jumps out with a knife and we see a few people get slashed, snoozily. Low budget, but not in a fun way.
The fantastic thing here is that Robbie landed a leading role in the ABC series Pan Am (2011) shortly after dropping this turd, and then she'd earn a bigger break in Wolf of Wall Street (2013). It's nice that you can be in trash then turn around and land a spot in a Scorsese cast. She pops! CHASE BURNS
Not at Scarecrow. A few people are selling DVDs of it for something between $25 and $70 on eBay.
Looking for more? Browse our big list of 350+ hard-to-find movies over on The Stranger.
*The fine print: Unstreamable means we couldn’t find it on Netflix, Hulu, Shudder, Disney+, or any of the other hundreds of streaming services available in the United States. We also couldn’t find it available for rent or purchase through platforms like Prime Video or iTunes. Yes, we know you can find many things online illegally, but we don’t consider user-generated videos, like unauthorized YouTube uploads, to be streamable.
