This is the second vertical AI BL drama I've sat through, and honestly I went in knowing better. I had it on while I was doing cardio at the gym, and what struck me was just how much the plot echoed the last one I watched. Same step brother romance angle, same mystery girlfriend showing up near the end, same extra guy pining after one of the leads. Genuinely the only thing going for it was the runtime, the whole thing wrapped up in forty five minutes flat. The setup kicks off with Finn moving schools because his mom just married into money. He finds out his new step brother Aiden goes to the same place, and he's warned to keep his distance from him. Their first run in at school is rocky, just like you'd expect, but there's this odd pull between them neither can shake off. Finn keeps telling himself not to read into it because Aiden's straight and openly homophobic. Things shift when some kids start bullying Finn and the student council president, Ryan, steps in to ...
Brian is a struggling writer who is in this writer's block moment who has a deadline to submit. He desperately needs human connection and love but for whatever reasons, every guy he meets wants ti just have hot passionate sex and nothing more afterwards. His many hookups include one fleeting moment with Jim. Jim is a young, beautiful, struggling actor who has just walked out on his lover Drew, an artist who fails to be able to connect to the world because he is too lost in his art. Finally we meet Bob, a talent agent from L.A. in his sixties who is being driven around in his white limo until he finds the right boy to pick up, well why not, he can afford it. In the process he ends up picking up Jim.
The film is shown over the course of one night with each of the four main characters introduced separately but as the film progresses their lives become intertwined. The character that runs through the middle of the narrative is Jim. He touches upon the stories of all of the men and over the course of the night he embarks on a journey of self-discovery. Chance encounters with both Brian and Bob help him to take a look back over his life and his decisions with surprising outcomes. ON paper the concept must have been interesting: 4 men of different backgrounds, age and ethnicities cross their paths over the course of one night but it fails in execution. None of the characters was fully developed for me to invest in them as an audience and as a result there is no connection at all. There are some elongated suggestive sexual scenes and moments of gaze and silence which become very tiring after a while. Towards the end, the film starts to find a little heart but all too quickly resolves before the morning sun rises.
The film could have been a very powerful one addressing the difficulty that modern gay men have balancing the physical and emotional connect in today's fast moving world where sex is so easy, but we just get that in bits and pieces. (4/10)
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