“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment”  (Hank to Alex)

Thought-provoking and intimate film experience, and it feels like a play on a stage with two characters, young Aaron/Alex (Kieron Moore) and 60-year-old Hank (Reed Birney). Aaron is a desirable camboy that addresses and treats his online audience, and Hank, a masked stranger, is one of his clients. They get together one night in a transactional encounter at a rented place in LA. The meeting unfolds before our eyes as the expensive recording session reveals their past.

The premise of the film and trailer shows attractive cinematography by  Ryan Jackson-Healy that provides the atmosphere for the story in which  Aaron performs and promotes himself via the internet and has an unexpected encounter with someone he met as a young teenager.

Through their dialogues, we learn  Aaron was a middle school lonely student in gym shorts with smooth legs. and (Professor) Hank was enamored and turned on by him.  Aaron asks why he watches his videos, Hank answers he wants to know who he is, making evident some guilt if so…  They talk about the art of domination, somehow spiritual and transcendent.

One sequence shows a kind of game among them, writing down adjectives, and more confessions are made from the past to the present. We are aware there have been sexual assaults, confinement, loneliness, family issues, pederasty, and a love relationship materialized in a tattoo above the eyebrow.

Written and directed by Elliot Tuttle, it was his debut feature at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2025.  The movie has faced both significant controversy and festival rejection and been deemed “too dangerous.” I do not think so,  it is deeply human and as such, structurally made of contradictions.

Quoting Walt Whitman in a Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”