One night in his near-empty tower block in contemporary London, Adam has a chance encounter with a mysterious neighbor, which punctures the rhythm of his everyday life.
Rated 5.0 / 5 from 2 logs on Katalog
Watched this quite a while ago but forgot to write a review. You can tell someone's work is incredebily good when you can completely dive in the story and feel emotional connection with the plot and the characters even though you don't have any true link to them. I mean, completely dive in the story. I seriously started questioning most all of my relationships and especially the ones with my parents after watching this. This movie is basically a story about deviance, sadness, isolation and nostalgia. And a beautiful, beautiful one. Highly recommend to anyone who wants to be deeply touched and who wants to cry their heart out.
In keeping with the theme of queer films that look to be about sex when they’re really about everything but: this film isn’t about sex any more than Anora is. It features physical intimacy, but it’s far too heavy to ever cross into erotic. I’ve started to suspect that Mescal’s real talent is the way he can lock into his scene partner—build his character as a complement, a counterweight, or a foil. Here he’s opposite Andrew Scott, who has the sort of precision you only earn after a long stretch onstage. In contrast, Mescal plays it loud, forward and dynamic—or, in other words, unstable, grasping, manic. Scott’s Adam is the film’s emotional centre, yes, but my heart latched onto Mescal’s Harry, almost to the exclusion of everything else. He plays emotional starvation with a clarity that’s almost frightening. There’s this air of a young man who has learned to buy intimacy with sex, not because he enjoys the transaction, but because it’s the only thing that worked, that was on offer. It’s gorgeous work, and honestly quite terrifying. That dynamic isn’t new, but we almost never see men play it—certainly not like this, stripped of cliché. There isn’t anything feminised in either of them; they avoid every tired gay trope with an ease that feels accidental, as if they’re skipping through a minefield without noticing. But it’s not accidental. It’s calibrated. And the fact that it reads as effortless is its own small miracle. It’s a difficult watch if you let it under your skin, and it offers nothing to the viewer who won’t. It will linger, if you let it. It will make you feel things years after watching it. You will remember the hotel scene, Harry’s desperation. The little smile and dull eyes. The horror of it.
I’m neither gay nor did my parents die in a car crash, and yet, somehow, I feel like I understood it a little, just a little of what it may really be like. A miraculous achievement, in my opinion
