This film is a genuinely moving story about courage, identity and inner freedom, centered on an intersex person trying to figure out who they really are. The fact that an actual intersex actor was cast in the lead role is genuinely worth applauding. It is apparently a remake of a classic film of same name that came out in 1972. Since I have not seen the film, I really have references to compare, which is good. Set in Spain, we meet Adela, a woman in her twenties and the only child of a conservative couple living in a small provincial town. Her days are mostly spent at the family antique shop, and her whole life has been shaped by her mother's overprotectiveness and total silence around her intersex condition, something she's faced real social discrimination for. Despite all the restrictions placed on her, she finds odd little pockets of normalcy in her life, and her closest connection is a gay priest, basically the only person she feels she can talk to freely. That quiet routi...
I was so lost watching this that I actually had to look up the plot online afterward just to understand what was supposed to be happening. So here's the gist. There's a disturbed cemetery worker named Dennis who hides serious physical disfigurements under this creepy hood, and he develops an obsessive, unhinged crush on someone. When he can't win this person over the normal way, he turns to increasingly dark and deadly methods, convinced that death is actually the way to be together forever. Running alongside that, there's a second storyline about a straight wrestling coach who suddenly finds himself attracted to one of his male students. As he wrestles with these confusing, forbidden feelings, the student ends up in serious danger because of it. The whole thing is supposedly about how far desperate men will go to get what they want, blending obsession and desire with some supernatural elements thrown in.
This movie left me so confused at points that I genuinely thought I'd accidentally skipped chunks of it. I kept waiting for it to click into place at some point but it just never did. It honestly feels closer to porn with a horror coating, minus any actual penetration or money shots. There's gratuitous male nudity everywhere, a lot of gay sex, an absurdly tangled plot, and at one point a guy doing naked push ups with a burlap sack over his head. This film genuinely has it all. I didn't really follow what was going on until close to the end, there were just too many moving pieces and way too many interchangeable young white twinks to keep straight. I'm still not entirely sure how some of these characters connect to the story at all. And I genuinely cannot believe this came out in 2018, even a cheap 90s gay slasher would have done better than this. (0/10)
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