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 ...
Two chimney sweeps, both in monogamous, heterosexual marriages, find themselves in situations that challenge their perspectives on sexuality and gender norms. One of them has been having a series of dreams in which he is in a passionate relationship with David Bowie who makes him feel like a woman, while the other recently had a sexual encounter with a male client, an unexpected but surprisingly wonderful experience, which gets tarnished as soon as he tells his wife about it. Neither considers himself to be homosexual, but they find themselves slowly questioning their identity as time goes on. The film then continues to focus on how the second guys wife reacts to his husband cheating. He copes with his wife’s intense emotional reaction to an event that he sees as an unexpected blip and they are both chocked by what happened. The story if the first guy is a bit all over the place and doesn't get a proper conclusion. He seems to fall back on cliches that the film can’t entirely explore because he himself doesn’t know how to recognize the heteronormative standards he’s judging himself by.
The two protagonists question their sexual identity and come to terms with their own deviances and the impact these have on their lives going forward. The film is also about how the men’s perspectives on themselves shift because of these events and how their family reacts to them. When the guy tells his friend about the event with another man, he just thinks as a one off thing, no biggie. As soon as his wife responds to the news, he becomes crestfallen because his actions hurt her, and she can’t get past it. And the two get into many conversations on what this really means for both of them, which I thought was interesting but after a while gets to much. It goes into the realm of "There can be sex without intimacy, intimacy without commitment, and not-at-all intimate sex". The other friend's story was a little arbitrary to me and I just couldn't connect with it. The Bowie dream becomes a recurring part of his sleep, but rather than waking up feeling uneasy, he begins to take pleasure in the sensation of being looked at as a woman. I read that the film has a deeper meaning especially with the parallels of sprawling city landscapes, but none of that mattered to me. I wanted to feel, how as a film it makes me feel, and I think it was just average. (4/10)
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