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 ...
Starting on a Tuesday night, we meet Noah, an introverted young engineer who needs to take pills due to a traumatic experience and has visions of a child. Next to him in Lohan, a tattoo artist and an asthmatic who likes to smoke and they both are apparently on a road trip with their best straight friend couple. A bond grows between the two men during the trip, they have fun visiting a church where Noah sits and Lohan confesses his impure thoughts, there is a first kiss after a Karaoke night, and there are arguments while bowling. As days go by they get to know each other while moving from one place to another, providing reflections on their lives and inner feelings. Lohan realizes and says Noah has entered his head like a tumor that doesn´t want to get out. We see how they had met a day before the film started. And it ends with a gay basher bashing the two in which Lohan has some sort of accident. The film has a bt of weird ending, which takes into account a comment that Noah had made earlier as to he is working on a chip that can save only nice memories for you.
What seems like an oddball gay romance turns into a weird, surreal fantasy film defying all and any expectations. It's imaginative and fired up and the two boys are extremely hot and share a very good chemistry. But this ending can be very controversial in the sense that people will either love it or hate it. I felt that it was rather under developed. The makers could have expanded more on the end if they were anyways trying to make a full length feature. These kind of shockers and abrupt ends work nicely in a short film format. Here it felt that something was missing. There are real and dreamy sequences, movie provides little information about the couple that also share the road and the cultural and social environment. This film is hard to classify as gay romance, sci-fi or just plain drama. The back stories of both characters are missing so the audience can only take them at face value. There are certainly interesting moments along the way but by the time the film ends, you wonder what really happened. It was likely an interesting idea on paper but an opportunity lost. A deliberately vague and almost dream-like watch, the film feels more like a concept than a fully-fledged story. (4/10)
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