Vague Visages’ Crawdaddy review contains minor spoilers. Dan Rocque and Kassandra Voss’ 2023 movie features Voss, Juan Riedinger and Nathan Barrett Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

During the earliest lockdown stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, it wasn’t uncommon for people to suggest that this historical era never needed to be depicted onscreen. Time has proven this take, which I agreed with at the time, to be completely wrong. Filmmakers ranging from Radu Jude and Bertrand Bonnello to Ari Aster now seem devoted to untangling the lingering mental effects of time spent at home, with only screens for company, as algorithms forced millions into increasingly niche and politically polarized echo spaces. But there’s another form of COVID character study that I haven’t seen represented onscreen — that of newly locked-down people using the increased time in those digital spaces to explore their sexuality or gender for the first time.

There are far more urgent coming-out stories to be told, but based purely on anecdotal evidence, this concept has a more universal resonance than one might expect. In fact, the most common iteration isn’t solely inherent to the queer community, something which a movie like Crawdaddy aims to explore. Multiple statistics have shown that surprising numbers of straight people found themselves getting in touch with desires they didn’t realize they held while cooped up inside, but cinema hasn’t really linked COVID with these sexual awakenings. That we’re now culturally more open to discussing this — because of that shared experience — might have led to a movie like Babygirl (2024) being released to moderate success, but there’s nothing within the text of the film itself nodding back to the pandemic. Crawdaddy, written and directed by Dan Rocque and Kassandra Voss (who also stars in the lead role), in their respective feature debuts, is inescapably about the pandemic as much as it is about the awakening of a new desire. But frustratingly, the film doesn’t appear to have much depth of insight on either topic, let alone the relationship between the two protagonists.

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Gwynn (Voss) first appears in Crawdaddy while giving a fourth wall-breaking speech, one that was presumably intended as a stylish, French New Wave-esque homage to the relationship talks in When Harry Met Sally… (1989) that unfortunately plays out like a lackluster mockumentary sitcom. It’s the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Gwynn discovers that her long-term partner, Adam (Nathan Barrett), a struggling actor played by an actor clearly struggling with the role himself, no longer satisfies her sexual desires. They’re close friends and confidantes who take pride in their openness with each other, but they’ve hit a brick wall, no longer capable of anything more intimate. Then, one night, Gwynn has a surreal sex dream about their married friend Lance (Juan Riedinger), and not only aims to consummate that but intends to use the experience as a springboard to explore further desires. Because this is the pandemic, the idea can’t stretch much further than becoming a cam girl, and despite the frankness with which Crawdaddy depicts sexuality, the writer/directors struggle to articulate the ways Gwynn becomes transformed beyond having a refreshed libido. 

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It’s been pointed out that we’re living in a sexless era for American cinema to the point of cliche. And in Crawdaddy, it often feels like the filmmakers coast on the sheer novelty of a movie this open in its sexuality, even within the contemporary indie space. Ironically, this is the only adult aspect of a relationship drama built from immature understandings of character dynamics, where the openness in both relationships depicted seems to change on a scene-by-scene basis. Viewers could get whiplash from how much Adam goes from being accepting of his partner’s desires towards his friend to cautious and restrictive, based on the dramatic requirements of each scene, with the director duo not strong enough as writers to pair both feelings into a coherent internal conflict. It doesn’t help that Barrett’s instincts are to transform the character into a broader comedic archetype than Adam likely appears on the page, accentuating every bit of dorky behavior — from a frustrated Zoom call with his parents about being a failed actor to multiple scenes of him “speed running” — in an effort to add further color to a one-note figure. 

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Instead of reining in Barrett, Rocque and Voss are happy to let him follow his misguided instincts, even if it clashes with the dramatic necessities of each sequence. By the time an important relationship conversation is introduced by Adam slapping his penis on a tambourine, in what appears to be a tribute to the drum kit set piece in Step Brothers (2008), any intent of having the audience take their relationship seriously has evaporated. Both performers go big but have drastically different ideas of what film they’re making, which doesn’t create the impression of a mismatched couple so much as a mismatched duo of performers.

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This isn’t to say that there is a more mature, sincere exploration of sexual desire when Adam isn’t around to give the audience the “ick”, with Lance functioning only as a bland love interest the female lead can project her wildest fantasies on. Redinger’s character isn’t written as a blank slate, but the film around him struggles in defining exactly why such an unassuming figure would trigger a major sexual awakening. Perhaps if Crawdaddy played into the idea of an unremarkably ordinary man becoming a sex symbol for comedy, the sillier tone elsewhere wouldn’t feel as disparate from the rest. And it would also help compensate for the lack of thoughtfulness when it comes to exploring the topic of desire. This is the overwhelming problem with Crawdaddy, a movie which is ultimately as emotionally stunted as its characters. You could never mistake its explicitness for maturity.

Crawdaddy released digitally on May 2, 2025.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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