After an incident at his college, a young man is taken by his parents to an anti-gay treatment centre. As the sessions continue, he sees more and more the damage this is causing both to himself and to the other people around him, as the centre tries to delve deeper into his psyche to change him into something he isn’t.
This is well acted and a good and interesting topic to discuss, but it never quite develops the power it might. The conversion centre is largely seen as incompetent and unwise – a very banal kinda evil (though there’s one point where one treatment on another patient is extremely intense), but our protagonist is never really put under particularly excessive pressure – and it means that a lot of the power seems slightly removed and displaced – he’s a nice middle-class boy who goes through something that’s a little bit unpleasant but it’s never really the case that he’s in particular danger of anything other than being bored and lectured to for an extended period. There’s details that distract slightly (Troye Silvain does a good performance as one of the other candidates but his hair seems too flamboyant for a guy who’s meant to be trying to duck under the radar), and it’s another film about gay people that seems slightly scared of showing what gay love might actually be like to a mass market audience (much like “Bohemian Rhapsody”, it can’t portray a happy gay relationship beyond mild handholding and loose hugging, and that can only ever be in the margins). Which is not to say this is a bad film – it’s just not what it could be.
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