Seventeen minutes into the offbeat indie rom-com Everything & the Universe, a woman walks into a hotel to check in for a weekend stay. The hotel lobby is bright and airy, with a wall of glass windows near the reception desk and a cream-and-crimson carpet underfoot.
It was here that my sister-in-law, Annie, watching the film last month after randomly encountering it on Amazon Prime, felt a click of recognition. She hit pause and Googled: Indeed, the lobby was that of The Durham Hotel.
As it turns out, Everything & the Universe—in which a man and a woman meet en route to the same wedding and realize they’re both in love with the bride—was filmed largely in Durham. It’s also explicitly set here, as opposed to representing an anonymous Southern city: characters argue over fries at The Federal, shop for suit jackets at Dolly’s, and swivel in salon chairs at Moshi Moshi, among gatherings at nearly a dozen other local spots.
The movie has been streaming on Amazon and Apple TV since last year. But there’s been no local press about it, and when I began asking around, few Durhamites knew it had been released—including some of the business owners whose spaces it features.
Erin Karcher owns the downtown bar Arcana, where some twenty minutes of the film are set. Everything & the Universe depicted the bar true to life down to the tarot readings, queer clientele, and its ambiguously pronounced name (characters debate whether it’s “Ar-canna” or “Ar-cah-na”).
Karcher recalled the shoot happening back in 2022 but didn’t realize the movie was out, or that it was a proper feature, until I emailed her to ask about it. She watched it almost immediately and loved it.
“Nobody knows about this, and they should. It’s delightful. It’s so Durham.”
erin karcher, owner, arcana
“Nobody knows about this, and they should. It’s delightful,” Karcher said. “It’s so Durham.”
Indeed, unlike the last notable film to feature a modern Bull City backdrop—the 2010 flop Main Street, which depicted Durham, anachronistically, as an emphysemic boondock wheezing from the collapse of the tobacco industry—Everything & the Universe has an uncanny grasp on the city in which it’s set.
Watching it felt, at times, like watching scenes I’d witnessed around town beat for beat, from the dialogue (“Fascists!” one character yells when it appears The Durham Hotel has fumbled a booking) to the antics (smoking weed atop the parking deck that overlooks the neon Old Bull sign) and soundtrack (Wye Oak, Big Thief).
Everything & the Universe also captures Durham’s sometimes contradictory identity as a Southern industrial town remade into a secular hub for science and culture. The female protagonist, Jane (Nicolette Pearsehere), is a chainsmoking scientist—equal parts Lucky Strike and RTP—whose rationalism walls her off from frivolous meaning-making but also from omens she’d do well to notice; she’s nicknamed Cancer for her Zodiac sign, and doesn’t seem to see, or be interested in, the irony.
Jane spends the wedding weekend pining after her best friend, the bride-to-be Sam (Chelsea Gilligan), while trying to stay chill—a posture destabilized by the fact that Sam seems to reciprocate her feelings, and further muddied by the man she met on the flight in, Sam’s ex Henry (E.J. Bonilla), who keeps insisting the universe brought him and Jane together to stop the wedding.
Henry is Jane’s foil; where she dismisses signs, he chases them, though mostly in ways that flatter what he already wants. At one point, he gets a tarot reading at the metaphysical shop Magic on 70 and balks when the cards don’t go his way: “I don’t have the best relationship with the moon, okay?” (The shop is real, owned by Lynn and Tom Swain, who also run MagikCraft near Ninth Street. Lynn Swain has a cameo as the shopkeeper.)
The film’s love triangle and metaphysical streak put it in company with the iconic film Bull Durham, which also prefers spirituality to religion (“the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball”) and pokes at the line between love and self-interest.
But for all of Bull Durham’s cosmic horniness, a 1988 movie can only feel current for so long. Everything & the Universe has refreshed the canon to capture a Durham that contains Lime scooters, queer third places, Cook-Out trays—and, for our sins, liberal men who idolize Elon Musk.
So how did the filmmakers get the city so right? And, in light of that fidelity, why has Everything & the Universe flown so under the radar?
After an unsuccessful attempt at reaching the director, Sarah Scarlett Downing, via LinkedIn, I got her email from an owner of The Federal and made contact. Downing told me that this is her first film and that it’s shaped by her experience living in Durham between 2008 and 2012, whilst attending a PhD program in English at Duke.
The film’s premise, that a queer woman and a straight man are both in love with the same woman, reflects how she sees the city as a place full of overlap.
“I wanted to make a film that felt a bit messy in that way, that isn’t just coded queer or hetero,” she wrote in an email. “I think maybe there is something of that to the city itself.”
Downing said it was a priority to showcase Durham businesses and to source from within the city wherever she could. That’s how her team found Jim McKeon, a resident artist at 5 Points Gallery downtown, whom they commissioned to paint a portrait that serves as a plot point in the film.
McKeon said he initially thought he was being pranked when producers approached him by walking into 5 Points and asking how he felt about full frontal male nudity.
“I was like, ‘I have no problem with that. I’m an artist. Painting dudes, not an issue,’” McKeon recalls.
He ended up producing a photorealistic nude of actor Luke Roberts, who plays the groom, working from reference photos Roberts sent over. Like Karcher, he hadn’t known the movie was out until I reached out. (He also didn’t know, until the last day of shooting, that a character pees on the painting in the film. “I got the painting back after the movie, and I was like, ‘that’s kind of sticky,’” he said.)
As to why the film hasn’t reached more Durhamites, Downing said getting a small indie movie in front of viewers—even hometown viewers—is a challenge. Everything & the Universe didn’t land distribution until last fall, through Persimmon, a subsidiary of the LGBTQ-focused distributor Narrative, which placed the film on Apple TV and Amazon for buy or rent. (When I mentioned to Downing that it was also streaming free on Prime, she said she somehow hadn’t heard and would be checking in with her distributors.)
“The things we have going against us are that our film wasn’t made with a studio and the actors are not well known, which is a big hurdle,” Downing wrote. “But this is also a widespread issue. It’s upsetting because people are making content, but it isn’t reaching people.”
In some ways, it’s actually fitting that my sister-in-law came across the movie the way she did: Everything & the Universe is a film about the universe sending you signs, and a Durham resident clicking randomly on a Durham movie is exactly the kind of thing the film would want you to read as fate. Still, it’d be nice to skip the celestial handoff every once in a while and just have someone tell you about a movie set where you live.
“I think a lot of people would connect with our film,” Downing said. “But this issue is getting it in front of people.”
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