Disturbing Blue Film Has a Power
That Can’t Be Denied

Writer-director Elliot Tuttle and his cast dive into some deep, choppy waters, including paedophilia, sexual perversion, religion, and domination, and the ways in which these themes interrelate here are often surprising.

By Kilian Melloy

Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore) is a fetish camboy who teases and berates his audience with PG-13 livestreams he conducts in his underwear. Sniffing his armpits and offering fleeting glimpses of his tighty whitey-clad junk, Aaron keeps up a patter designed to make any sub happy, including frequent demands for tips; this seems to be his full-time gig. As the film opens, Aaron informs his viewers that he’s due to meet a superfan who will be paying him $50,000 in cold, hard cash for a face-to-face IRL meetup.

Cue the interaction in question: After making his away across L.A. to a short-term rental, Aaron is greeted by a video camera-wielding man in a ski mask (Reed Birney). Shrugging this off as a “people are weird” sort of thing, he comes in, shucks his kit, accepts a beer, and starts telling his life story, in fits and starts, in answer to the man’s questions.

As the man’s questions grow more probing, Aaron starts to push back, refusing to talk about certain things like the tattoo above his eyebrow or what his real name might be. As it happens, though, the man knows plenty already about Aaron and his background — including his real name. Most people would hit the panic button at this point… actually, well before this point… but curiosity and a desire to unmask his interrogator overcome Aaron, and thus begins a long night of confessions, drinking, drugs, intimate shaving, and occasional attempts at sex.

Writer-director Elliot Tuttle and his cast dive into some deep, choppy waters, including paedophilia, sexual perversion, religion, and domination, and the ways in which these themes interrelate here are often surprising… and, just as often, uncomfortable. Personally, I wish the film had taken the time and effort to convey, in some way, the statistical fact that more than 90% of paedophiles are heterosexual. It also would have been nice had the movie exploded, rather than leaned into, the myth that people who have been sexually abused in childhood are inevitably doomed to perpetuate that abuse.

Still, the film’s power cannot be denied. Moore spends much of the runtime in his underwear, or less, but that’s not where the real heat lies; there’s so much that’s emotionally raw here that the only adequate trigger warning is to tell you to be prepared to be angered, unsettled, and moved in equal measure. This isn’t a movie you’ll see for laughs (though there are moments of levity), but neither is it one you’ll soon forget.

Blue Film is available now on digital from Obscured Releasing at major platforms, including Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango, and Google Play.