“Who Are All These People Telling Us To Punch Each Other?”
The cast and crew of Novocaine break down the film’s unorthodox influences.
Novocaine starts with such an endearing romance, its stars nearly forgot they were making an action movie.
“We completely forgot about every other element of the movie, because that was what we started with when we were shooting,” Amber Midthunder tells Inverse. “Our first day was our by far most intimate scene.”
Midthunder stars as Sherry, one-half of Novocaine’s charming central relationship. She is the dream girl who shakes the mild-mannered Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) out of his sheltered, solitary inner world. Thanks to a neurological condition known as CIPA, Nate is impervious to pain — and while some may consider that a superpower, he has to work overtime to avoid accidental impalement... or worse. Still, that doesn’t stop him from experiencing pleasure, an idea that Novocaine dedicates its first act to exploring.
Watching Sherry and Nate fall in love, it really is hard to remember that Novocaine isn’t actually a rom-com. But that doesn’t last long: before our lovebirds can bask in their honeymoon era, they find themselves caught in a violent robbery at the bank where they both work.
“It was a shock when we got to the bank robbery,” Quaid adds. “Like, ‘Who are all these people telling us to punch each other?’”
Novocaine is definitely an action-thriller — and a brutal one at that — but it’s also a love story.
Novocaine doesn’t slow down much after that. When Sherry is taken as a hostage, Nate takes it upon himself to rescue her. From that point on, the film has a lot more in common with John Wick than it does with When Harry Met Sally — but the cast and crew all insist that the early romance is crucial to Novocaine’s success.
“When you think through at least the last three features we’ve made, it’s like looking at love through different sort of facets of a stone or something,” Dan Berk, who co-directed Novocaine alongside Robert Olsen, tells Inverse. There’s a consistent, if subtle, thread that unites the duo’s work. Berk and Olsen are no strangers to blood, gore, or horror, as their resume will happily attest. But their 2022 film, Significant Other, and 2019’s Villains, each use romance as a tool to contextualize bloodshed and fear.
“We had to make sure that we made the romance believable ... or else the whole movie kind of falls apart.”
Now, they have Novocaine, which might just be “the sweetest film of them all.” It’s all about how far someone’s willing to go for love — if that someone just so happens to have an unlimited tolerance for pain. That premise allowed Berk and Olsen to splice the beats of a romantic comedy with a nihilistic, ultraviolent world. Sherry’s bond with Nate becomes the heart of the film — it’s the reason (aside from his unique condition) Nate is able to shake off broken bones, third-degree burns, and even an arrow through the leg.
“We had to make sure that we made the romance believable and that we were a couple you wanted to root for,” Quaid adds, “or else the whole movie kind of falls apart.”
Berk and Olsen used “heart and humor” to off-set the bloodshed in Novocaine.
Berk and Olsen are massive fans of high fantasy, from Dungeons and Dragons to the “swords and sandals” epics from Hollywood’s golden age. That love of fantasy helped them initially connect with their leading man, and it helped inform Nate’s journey in unexpected ways. (Since he can’t feel pain, his body is covered in a tattoo tapestry of a white knight fighting monsters, ideal foreshadowing for his crusade in Novocaine.)
“Those sorts of things are really nice crystallizations of the hero’s journey, because they’re so sort of black-and-white in that regard,” Berk says. He likens Novocaine to a tale of “a knight going to save a damsel,” just with a lot more brutality. The original story, penned by Lars Jacobson, was meant to take the violence even further than it goes in the finished product (which, if you’ve seen Novocaine, is really saying something). Berk and Olsen chose to make it all “a little lighter,” bringing more specificity to the romance.
“The violence is so intense that you almost have to have this heart and humor and romance to balance it, so that it doesn’t feel gratuitous,” adds Olsen.
For all the filmmakers’ inherent romanticism, Novocaine still goes to dark places, guiding its lead through a gauntlet of blood, broken glass, and other things you’ll have to see to believe. The more squeamish among us may need a palate cleanser after all is said and done. And after back-to-back roles in hyperviolent projects like The Boys and Companion, Quaid might even be ready for a straightforward rom-com.
“I would love to do something where I’m covered in slightly less blood,” he jokes. “Just slightly.”
