In the Flesh: Castration Movie Pt. 1

Star and director Louise Weard begins and ends the first half of her operatically-sized Castration Movie with broken people trying and failing to be in love. First there’s Turner (Noah Baker) and his girlfriend Brooklyn (Jasmine Provins), a nominally cishet couple with all the chemistry of peanut butter and mayonnaise, their relationship foundering under the weight of their separate brands of dysfunction. Right from the jump, the acting Weard manages to draw out of her cast is astonishing, ably complimented by raw, grimy handheld camerawork. Baker may be the first chapter’s standout, so palpably mentally ill and unbalanced that it’s physically painful to watch him try to relate to others, but Provins more than matches him, her low affect and contradictory, self-loathing way of relating to Turner suggesting the kind of internal conflict and complexity her facade conceals long before we’re given any kind of explanation. Weard's script deftly parcels out information through implication and inference, filling in the outlines of her captivating cast of characters without ever slowing things down. Aoife Josie Clements is a particular delight as the vacillating, depressed Adeline.

It’s remarkable, in fact, how quickly the 4.5-hour Castration Movie clips along. Even when Weard’s camera leaves us trapped right up against excruciating maladaptive behavior for minutes on end, unflinching and unmoving, the performances are so nuanced and the script so compelling that there’s no question of anything dragging. A case in point, the “Dune scene”, in which Traps (Weard) visits her friend and dealer, Persephone (Vera Drew), and her roommates, Michaela (Cricket Arrison) and Alyssa (Alice Maio Mackay), who are in the middle of an agonizingly toxic argument about Persephone’s failure to read Michaela’s favorite novel, Dune. The central thrust remains constant throughout the nearly seven-minute unbroken shot, but the discussion is so full of digressions, bizarrely revealing character moments, and shocking interjections that it feels as lively as Rust Cole tearing his way through that apartment complex in True Detective. Alyssa’s scream of overstimulated rage/panic/frustration/fear/depression after she spends the entire sequence lying boneless and silent on the couch is an incredible button.

There’s a sparkling ambient haze of eating disorders, party drugs, poverty, and the black, sucking void of mental illness hanging over the second chapter of Weard’s film, the kind of atmosphere that seems effortless only because it requires such careful, patient cultivation. Anyone who’s ever come up as trans knows what these apartments feel like, smell like, sound like, knows the cadence of these conversations, the conlang of therapy speak, gutter argot, and half-joking obscenity. It’s shockingly real, the kind of inside baseball narrative you’d never see in a mainstream project about trans people, and while it’s certainly infused with the naturalism you’d expect, there’s no doubt as to the professional quality of its direction and story. By the time we come full circle to Traps deluding herself into thinking she has a relationship with her chaser client, Christian (Cameron Peterson), the feeling of despairing alienation Weard has managed to conjure is so strong it’s almost impossible to watch. To take a movie about such mundane subject matter and infuse it with the gravitas of a Doré print or a novel by Plath, to elicit the divine from the quotidian, is the purest expression of mastery of craft.

You can buy Castration Movie, Pt. 1 here.