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The two leads give very vulnerable and volatile performances. Owing to this alone, it’s hard to be dismissive of the entire thing. It moves at a steady clip and never gets stuck, and deals with some really messy aspects of desire, revenge, and internalized homophobia. I’ll always have admiration for queer artists attempting to tell unpopular and uncomfortable queer stories. But it’s a bit too generic for my tastes. It doesn’t really feel like there is a vision or ideas here, just a story to be told in the contemporary manner. 170
There is nothing wrong with that, of course, it’s just not my thing. I found the violence to be a bit tiresome: not really generic in its tropes, but neither is it transcendent in any meaningful way. Perhaps billing this as a revenge thriller set it up for failure, as it feels both constrained and wasted by its genre, and its climax is very unsatisfying. Was it going for subversion of expectations? Too many queer festival films feel like this and make me wonder if the desire to “tell queer stories” has totally superseded any cinematic sensibilities. That may sound too harsh, but after three years as a queer film programmer I simply can’t be bothered with films like this. If I hadn’t watched it for work, I would have turned it off after 20 minutes. 823