Departures (UK)

This was a genuinely interesting genre to stumble into, a tragicomedy about a guy spiraling through a toxic situationship and a bad breakup. Story-wise it's probably not breaking new ground, but the way it's put together feels really fresh and the whole approach to the topic stands out. It takes a pretty honest, unfiltered look at queer dating, body image, and that constant struggle with self-worth. The nonlinear structure, paired with quick energetic editing and voiceover, really pays off. The whole message is basically that sometimes you have to look back before you can actually move forward.

The film opens with Benji getting dumped by his boyfriend. He spirals hard trying to deal with the rejection, drinking every day, with his mom growing increasingly worried about him. He eventually realizes that to move forward he has to revisit his past first. Benji has figured out he's submissive and tends to go for men who are dominant and a bit rough with him in bed, but he still wants someone who'll hold him afterward and actually hold his hand too. We jump back eighteen months to when he meets Jake at an airport, this incredibly attractive guy, both of them heading to Amsterdam for the weekend. Jake makes it clear right away that he's straight. The two click instantly, Jake brings a girl back with them and later ends up sleeping with Benji too. They strike up an arrangement to keep meeting in Amsterdam every month, with Jake covering all the costs. The sex is great but Jake keeps insisting he's straight the whole time. Eventually all that good time together starts falling apart because Benji wants more than just the physical, and Jake makes it very clear that's never going to happen. Jake isn't just avoiding his own feelings, he also loses his temper the moment anyone pushes him on it, and he genuinely struggles to grasp that other people have needs too. Benji eventually finds out Jake has a girlfriend back home, and through flashbacks we watch the whole thing slowly fall apart. Back in the present, as Benji tries to move on, he meets a guy for what's supposed to be a hookup, except this guy turns out to be genuinely decent and suggests coffee instead. They talk, connect, and that's the moment Benji finally realizes he actually needs to let go of all of it. The film also gives us glimpses into both Jake and Benji's childhoods and how those years shaped who they became.

A lot of this film just works, and a big part of that comes down to how it's put together visually. There's this layered, almost scrapbook style where illustrations get placed over key moments, and it gives the whole thing a playful texture you don't usually see. Most of the story comes through Benji's own perspective, leaning heavily on voiceover, and that choice pays off because it's delivered with real self-deprecating humor and a kind of rawness that feels genuine rather than performed. His internal monologue doesn't pull punches, and it ends up giving voice to stuff that almost never gets this kind of honest screen time, toxic masculinity, body image struggles, the specific pressures that exist within the gay community. Underneath all that, the film is really wrestling with trauma, desire, and the ways people end up sabotaging themselves. Benji himself reads as a relatable, average guy, the type usually shoved to the side in favor of someone with perfect abs and a sharp jawline, and that's honestly a real issue both in queer media and in the community at large, so it's nice to see him centered for once. Jake's character also lands well, and the casting there feels exactly right. He's not just a hot guy playing the villain, he's someone with genuinely stunted emotional skills, stumbling through a world that keeps rewarding the worst instincts in him. The film does something smart by showing how internalized homophobia builds up slowly inside a person, quietly wearing away at their sense of self over years without them ever fully clocking how much damage that self-hatred has caused. Plenty of people are going to see themselves somewhere in this, whether they've personally hit the extremes Benji does or not. There's also a surprising amount of humor woven through it, with genuinely funny beats showing up in some pretty dark moments, and the filmmakers take real risks blending those tones without it ever feeling off. Somehow it all comes together to make Benji likable even while he's spiraling and sabotaging everything around him, and even the homophobia in the film gets handled with this strange, almost tender comic touch.

Comparison to Pillions might happen with this film but I thought they are two very different films. A genuinely refreshing take on relationships, whether you've been burned by someone else or burned yourself the way Benji ends up doing to himself. (7/10)