Few contemporary films about unresolved childhood abuse — which is always unresolved, in the end, anyway — cut as narrowly close to the bone as Elliot Tuttle’s two-hander masked as provocation, “Blue Film.”
Rejected by mainstream film festivals before it premiered in Edinburgh this summer and NewFest in New York in October, this taboo-busting study of a masculine camboy confronted by the pedophile teacher who many years ago desired him holds back little and offers even less that’s palatable to swallow. Its limitations as a stagelike piece aside, the movie wrings emotional complexity from a fraught, ever-shifting dialogue between a convicted child abuser and the student, now a late twenties sex worker, he spared.
“Blue Film,” which takes place entirely in a rented Hancock Park Airbnb in Los Angeles with only two actors, dares to go places I have not seen an American movie travel to in a while. There was an Israeli movie called “Princess” at Sundance in 2014, directed by Tali Shalom Ezer, which freaked a lot of people out. It was about a 12-year-old girl’s “close relationship” with her mother’s boyfriend. There was the 2011 Austrian movie “Michael,” directed by Michael Haneke protégé Markus Schleinzer, about an insurance salesman sexually abusing the 10-year-old boy locked up in his basement. These were shocking. Neither were American.
Tuttle, an American filmmaker himself who received support on the project from Mark Duplass of all possible collaborators, is willing to take you to those same dark places, ones that remind you of European directors who want to shake you with their frank psychosexual provocations. It’s impressive where Tuttle, this second-time feature filmmaker, goes with his surprisingly humanistic and empathetic approach to material about abuse. One where a pedophile teacher’s sexual fantasy about his former student’s talent show performance emerges as oddly wistful.
“Blue Film” stars rising actor Kieron Moore as dom camboy Aaron Eagle (whose real name is Alex McConnell) opposite Reed Birney as his estranged middle school teacher, who reconnect over one night filled with conversations about desire, shame, and guilt. I’m not surprised festivals, allegedly such as Sundance and SXSW, looked away from it. Mainstream audiences will be alienated by this unapologetic exploration of quote-unquote aberrant sexuality, but those looking for a challenge in the vein of ‘90s films from Todd Solondz or Gregg Araki will feel seen in Tuttle’s exploration of how abuse warps memory, and memory warps accounts of abuse.
In asking you to feel sorry for a pedophile while making a gay man his scene partner, “Blue Film” dances on the tricky line from early abuse to later-in-life sexual behavior. When the movie begins, we see Aaron (Moore), sweaty and hairy in white briefs and tattooed top-to-toe, putting on a live stream for his submissive followers. One of his anonymous fans offers $50,000 for an in-person meet-and-greet. Financially desperate, he agrees to spend the night with the client, who greets him sheathed in a balaclava with the promise of even more money and perhaps pizza if Aaron is willing to open up about himself.
That client, it turns out, is Mr. Grant, aka Hank, Aaron’s long-ago teacher, and one who took a special interest in Aaron as a child. Some time while Aaron was in school, Hank was intercepted sexually assaulting a child on campus, was fired from his job, and received a prison sentence. With the mask off and Aaron stripped down yet again, their walls start to come down. Hank, he reveals, has now turned to religion as an atonement for his own torment, but his search for meaning has not been without other attempts at or contemplations of assaulting kids, as he tells Aaron.
Tuttle’s script and camera pass no judgment on the characters, like when Aaron shares a bone-chilling story of childhood abuse while naked in a bathtub that may or may not be true, or when Hank also offers a sickening recounting of molestation he endured at the hands of a relative. The actors are as game as any you could imagine, working from a script that you can imagine a lot of people said “hell no” to.
Birney, 71, and best known for work in television and theater (“The Humans”), invites you to feel all his hurt, even as his world is a morally disturbed one we are made to live inside for the movie’s running time. As Aaron, Moore, meanwhile, conceals deep wounds of his own, while also high on the power imbalance this situation has tipped his way, where Hank wants to know if he “still loves” Aaron. Another wrinkle is that the camera certainly wants us to also desire Moore, who is often next to naked, placing us at least adjacent to Hank’s gaze.
Hank is also curious about whether he can still be attracted to adult whom he once desired as a child. He shaves Aaron head to toe to make him look more physically childlike in one of the film’s queasier implications. What these two actors take on is undeniably brave, even as the movie tilts toward becoming suffocating, which is intentional. “Blue Film” is confined to a single environment, after all.
Cinematographer Ryan Jackson-Healy also shot the equally controversy-starting, Birney-led film “Mass,” about the ramifications of a school shooting for the parents affected. The DP knows his way around a tight room with just a few people, and the visual beauty of this movie (indeed, often cloaked in literal blues as night turns to dawn) helps alleviate the agonies on display.
Tuttle wisely avoids flashbacks or out-of-this-room context. We are stuck with these two people and our discomfort with them, even though we might also feel tenderness toward them. “Blue Film” nudges at a lot of tricky issues, like the question of whether being gay in the present day is somehow the result of inflictions of the past. And the parallel to that question is whether abuse can also beget more abuse, i.e. make you into a pedophile or sex offender. Hank says he knew who he was once his sexual fantasies in middle school, about his fellow same-age classmates, remained the same into adulthood. What Tuttle wants to attack here is this terrible fork-in-the-road notion that pedophilia and homosexuality stem from the same root.
Still, “Blue Film” does the rare work of listening with compassion to a pedophile such as Hank, and as an audience, you can either be curious about that or just let it make you uncomfortable. Hank is tormented by who he is, as is Aaron, but they are not the same person, and they did not come from the same place. “Blue Film” leaves you feeling a little bit ill, and very uneasy about how you’re supposed to feel. But when most films either wouldn’t dare go here at all, or would tell you how to feel about the material, that’s rare and welcome.
Grade: B+
“Blue Film” premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival and NewFest. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.