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 ...
There are four friends at the center of this, Lovro, Nenad, and two others, and they'd all fought the Nazis together as partisans back in WWII. Fast forward sixteen years to the late fifties and they've become well known filmmakers. Because of their military service they've got backing from higher ups in government, which lets Lovro and Nenad work on set without anyone bothering them, and their relationship is out in the open, even their parents are fine with it. Trouble starts though when Lovro tries sneaking in a scene for their new film that basically implies a border guard and a soldier from the Yugoslav People's Army run off together to Italy, and someone from the censorship board watching the set catches on. That's when Emir gets sent in, a middle aged bureaucrat stuck in the middle ranks, quietly told to wreck the production from the inside without making it official. What's interesting is Emir isn't really bothered by the fact that the couple's gay, he's just there to kill the film. His sabotage attempt backfires though and he ends up caught in a fire, and the four friends end up being the ones who save him. Feeling like he owes them, he invites them out to his sister's place by the sea for a relaxing weekend, completely missing what that could set off. The government seizes the moment to out them as gay, arrests them, and hauls them off to Barren Island, a real feared prison colony from that era where they didn't even need cells, the ocean itself kept people from running. The movie doesn't shy away from showing the torture gay people faced back then. Once Emir learns the truth about what's happened, he tries to step in and save them, but the film leaves things pretty unresolved by the end.
The backdrop here is 1957, right after Yugoslavia had just gotten free of Nazi fascism only to land under Tito's communist rule, and he wasn't exactly forgiving of anyone who spoke out of line, gay people very much included. It's shot in black and white and it's stunning, weaving together political scheming and undercover surveillance with genuinely tender love scenes and horrifically cruel treatment from government agents. Right from the opening the film throws us into an explicit sex scene between Lovro and Nenad, and there are more scenes like that scattered through the runtime, which does a lot of work establishing who they are to each other. Things get pretty busy once Emir's sabotage plot kicks in. We meet a whole bunch of characters, and we watch the government try to turn some of these friends against each other, Nenad included. When he ends up feeding them some vague, half useless info, it leads into this brutal torture sequence. And by the time we hit the final stretch, the movie turns into this harsh, unflinching portrait of cruelty that somehow still manages to feel artistic. Honestly my feelings on this one are kind of split. I get that the director's going for something gritty and true to life, but there's just so much crammed into the screen at points that I found myself losing track of things. I genuinely couldn't tell you how the other two friends fit into the story, or whether one of them ended up betraying the other, that whole thread felt unclear to me. Even the ending left me without any real closure, and I'm still not sure what the choice to switch to color for the last five minutes was supposed to mean.
On the plus side, there's no shortage of intensity between Lovro and Nenad. Whatever's between them feels real and full of heat, raw in a way that still stays tasteful, and it kind of pulls you in and makes you want more of it. The black and white cinematography was a smart call, it looks beautiful throughout. Both lead actors are stunning to look at and they bring genuinely strong performances too. I also appreciated getting to watch Emir change and develop as the story went on. That said, I do think the writing and the edit needed more polish. Some parts really needed more context for someone coming into this without background knowledge, while other characters and scenes honestly felt unnecessary to the story.
At the end of the day it's still a gorgeous, brave and important film, a story with real emotional weight about gay filmmakers in post war Yugoslavia fighting not just to make their art but to simply be allowed to exist in a world working hard to erase them. (7/10)
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