In Eliza Hittman’s startlingly sensual study of conflicted masculinity, a Brooklyn teenager leads a perilous double life, cruising older men online while playing super straight to his homophobic homies.
A hyper-focused, dream-like portrait of a teenager grappling with both the conditions of his upbringing and a newfound identity.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2017
Beach Rats 2017
British actor Harris Dickinson is hypnotising as a buff Brooklyn teenager projecting a front of churlish masculinity with his homies and his hotshot girlfriend, while craving the tenderness of men and mourning the slow decline of his dying father. Every frame of Eliza Hittman’s film pulses with desire and its denial.
“Eliza Hittman’s second feature is very much the work of a filmmaker with her own distinctive voice, combining moody poetry with textural sensuality to evoke the dangerous recklessness that often accompanies sexual discovery. Shifting from the portrait of adolescent female experience in her striking debut, It Felt Like Love, Hittman here turns her penetrating gaze on a Brooklyn teenage boy navigating an even more pivotal transition, played with understated intensity by promising newcomer Harris Dickinson…
Hittman folds Helene Louvart’s evocative summertime images, composer Nicholas Leon’s brooding electronic notes and the fluid rhythms shaped by editors Scott Cummings and Joe Murphy into a raw observational portrait that leaves a haunting impression in its wake.” — David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter