The Marriage Trilogy of Ryan Balas and Dee Herlihy
FilmStack Challenge #10: January 2026
This month’s FilmStack Challenge comes from Kelli McNeil-Yellen of KLA Media Group:
LIST your film(s) in this spreadsheet. Provide as much or as little info as you like about your film (series, pilot, doc, short, animation, feature, anything goes)
WATCH other filmmaker’s movies et al
REVIEW other filmmaker’s movies on platforms (and on your Substacks!!!) - IMDb needs 100+ reviews to mean anything, Rotten Tomatoes needs 50+ to unlock the Popcorn Meter. Amazon needs 60+ for any meaningful impact. And ALL of these platforms need to be constantly stimulated to recommend your film to other viewers.
RECOMMEND films you like to others in your sphere, via a social media post, verbal recommendation or otherwise and on your Substacks with links on where others can watch (this part is crucial to the challenge).
SHARE this spreadsheet and this post with other filmmakers who could also benefit and encourage them to do the same - this is how we branch out past the FilmStack bubble.
This is the tenth FilmStack monthly challenge, but even I’ve had a hard time keeping track despite participating in each one of them, so I’m appreciating the shift in nomenclature to month and year than number. I’ll try to track both in my subtitles, but “FilmStack Challenge: January 2026” works for me.
I’ve been following Ryan Balas’ Substack The Hudson Film Club as the only filmmaker on this website other than me and CODECXS that has experimented with Substack’s video posts as a film distribution platform. Despite tracking on that interest, I have not actually had the time to watch the movies he’s posted, largely because they are feature films. I used Kelli’s challenge as an opportunity to finally get around to his work, and one way to look at a cross section was to watch through his self-defined “Marriage Trilogy,” a series of three movies he made in collaboration with his now ex-wife Dee Herlihy.
An intimate look at the end of a real marriage through a semi-fictional / heavy meta re-telling by two filmmakers, who met and fell in love while in acting school.
Set around Christmas time, this is the melancholy end to a loose trilogy about Marriage by Ryan Balas & Dee Herlihy, which includes the first two entries “Ice Saints” and “Our House for the Weekend”.
Writ large, the Marriage Trilogy follows a pretty satisfying three-act structure: beginning of the marriage, middle of the marriage, and end of the marriage. It’s almost uncanny how cleanly it maps in that regard, but their hybrid documentary / narrative structure shows that both ‘characters’ are aligned in blending and blurring the line between their lives and their art, which is a risky way to live: it runs you the risk of making decisions around what would make a better story. Nevertheless, though their relationship as husband and wife did not work out, it’s clear that their relationship as artistic collaborators and friends did.
Ice Saints (2013)
I worked for many years at a digital studio called The Skin Deep and helped produce and edit hundreds of videos in their ongoing digital series {The And}, so when this feature started with a shot-off-of-monitor recording of Ryan asking Dee, “What do you remember from the first time we met?” I had a wild moment of parsing through my memory thinking, “Oh shit, is there a {The And} Dee & Ryan video I don’t remember?”
It is shortly after revealed that they are in an acting workshop together, and immediately the line is blurred between whether Ryan’s question or Dee’s answer is an actual part of their relationship together, or a story they are performing for screen or the feedback of their instructor.
By the way, this is exactly why we rarely casted performing artists for {The And}. For many actors, it was difficult to get them in front of a camera without being aware and turning it into a performance, which we could quickly tell. We had a process of directing {The And} where we endeavored to enable the guests to be completely vulnerable with each other.
Ice Saints advertises its vulnerability early on by diving straight into scenes of domestic but non-sexual nudity of both characters. Narratively, the movie is placed at about the end of their eight year unmarried relationship together and takes us through their wedding and shortly after. The nudity is representative of their relationship itself: they are comfortable enough to “let it all hang out” together (and for the audience), but still uncomfortable enough to square with what it means to the cleanliness of their apartment (and for the amusement of their audience).
I have seen a few documentaries that were made out of home videos; Ice Saints feels a little like the opposite, an attempt to elevate their wedding video into a full feature documentary. By doing so, Balas and Derlihy push past just the memory-making elements of a wedding video to create a narrative around the feeling of getting married, as regards how to navigate their relationship; how to navigate their own fears, uncertainties, and doubt (anxiety will be a regular theme throughout the trilogy); and most importantly — at least, my favorite part of the movie — a young couple comfortable with themselves but still struggling with the weight of the future and its persistent inability to be known.
Back to the actor / vulnerability thing. The edges of Ice Saints are frayed a little in various dialog scenes where Balas and Derlihy hang together and discuss these things with each other. It’s clear that these conversations are based on conversations that already happened, but that the two performers are also trying to express those conversations and not necessarily having them spontaneously or naturally. In some cases they really do sound like they are reading off lines rather than listening and responding to each other.
Nevertheless, this is an early work and it’s interesting to see how this approach developed over the course of the next two features.
Our House for the Weekend (2017)
The second movie in the trilogy covers about a year or so after they are married, and is set in Derlihy’s childhood home as they housesit for her vacationing parents.
This movie I would consider a little closer to mockumentary. Balas and Derlihy play “Husband” and “Wife” as they discuss their roles in housesitting (or really, homemaking). Unsurprisingly, much of narrative about division of labor and home management turns toward conversations of the big question: are they ready to have children?
In this case the hang-out dialogs work better than Ice Saints. For one thing, they have both improved as filmmakers and performers. For another thing, it feels like these hangouts are better written and planned. It’s interesting to think that the further removed from realism this docunarrative hybrid is, the more truthful it comes across. Hold that thought.
Just as they seem to be coming to a cozy domestic understanding, Husband overlooks the need to latch a door and the family cat escapes. The weekend is thrown into disarray as Husband and Wife bicker, argue, and desperately search for the lost pet while recriminating each other and themselves. At question is their confidence in caretaking and all the anxieties they’ve discussed before become less of an intellectual conversation between a couple and more of a personal panic attack.
This series of sequences is the funniest amongst the entire trilogy. I wouldn’t say it’s the most enjoyable, in the sense that the other movies are enjoyable in their dramatic highs and lows, but this roughly 20 minute section within the trilogy is the part of their relationship where you get to hang out and laugh along with them, as they playfully parody their own arguments and relationship dynamics. There is a car scene that basically sums it all up, who they are as individuals, characters, partners, artists, and observers of human relationships.
Ex Ex Ex (2021)
After the hope of Ice Saints and the hilarity of Our House for the Weekend, the trilogy plunges us into a darker and more depressing movie, as our leads now divorce.
Interestingly enough, even further narrative distance is built between the real filmmakers and the characters they portray.
No longer do they speak directly to camera, but rather in voice over. Similarly they are no longer hanging together and talking to each other, but reminiscing alone (except for Alice’s ex-boyfriend in a few scenes) and addressing only themselves. They’ve now brought in a third camera person and a better score (Ice Saints is bedded with an unfortunate, repetitive audio library piano track, Our House has a few cool song samples, but Ex Ex Ex is originally scored, including with a really cool guitar track that turns Christmas themes into breakup music). There’s a new character. But above all, and most striking, is that now their characters have names: Ben and Alice.
Despite having the most narrative distance, Ex Ex Ex is the most honest movie of the trilogy.
It also has the least of their nudity. Funny how that worked out.
Anyway, the movie cuts back and forth between Ben and Alice as they wonder aloud What happened? and most particularly When do you know the relationship is over?, a question they probably would not have been able to answer in the film satisfactorily had they kept their own names for characters or representational names like “Husband” and “Wife”, being that their relationship is clearly not over: they’re making a movie together. Their marriage is what is ending, which is a separate thing.
Where Ex Ex Ex most shines is how losing a relationship, particularly a close one, also feels like losing some part of yourself: your memory, your self-understanding, even your mind. For a couple whose personalities, work, AND romantic attachment were bound together in one tight knot, the fallout of self-identity is that much more profound, and that much more felt. To some degree the other two movies stand alone: this movie, however, you get an additional boost to understanding by having lived in their good times for a short period of time. I wouldn’t know how well this movie comes across without having seen the other two.
The movie does end, finally, with a to-camera address in a white cyclorama — a closing parenthetical of the empty white space of the first shot of the trilogy, probably intentional. This address, rather than introducing their marriage as a performance, closes their marriage as an apology.
Compounding the loss and disorientation of the divorce is the fact that some of Ex Ex Ex was shot during the 2020 COVID pandemic shut-downs. Gratefully, this is not addressed in the movie itself, though to some degree it is felt. There are some unfortunately already dated shots of Balas wandering outside, mask on, which made me wonder about this movie being seen a generation or two from now and, without the context of the pandemic being known, how a future audience could interpret the masking as some sort of costuming intended to represent something symbolic!
Ex Ex Ex is available on Substack here:
Despite my interest in these movies being somewhat about Substack-as-distribution, I ended up watching it on Tubi. I realized that watching a movie off a laptop instead of a television screen makes me feel like I am either screening for a festival or doing research. During a period of my life when I did not have a television, I at least used to set the laptop on a table and away from where I was sitting to make it feel more like a small television. Once I’m within typing distance of the keyboard, it no longer feels like ‘watching’ to me.
That feeling has implications regarding Substack as distribution. Whereas I can view YouTube or Vimeo on my Roku, I do not think Substack has a Roku app, and that makes it difficult for casual film viewers to find movies using Substack as a platform.
Nevertheless, I like using Substack as a distribution for my Experimental Films because it’s a place that allows them to live on their own curated pages like Vimeo, but within a feed of context surrounded by my other work. YouTube doesn’t work for me because it embeds my own movies with their own context into a world of other algorithmically driven contexts, meaning my work much more easily leads to boner pills and QAnon than it does to me or my professional opportunities.
However, Substack-as-distribution won’t be effective if people don’t expect to find movies on Substack. In that regard, Ryan Balas is taking a mighty swing by offering feature film length projects for free.
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🙏🏻 thank you for watching these. Wow. Really means a lot to me. Deeply and sincerely. Thank you.