Building the New Queer Canon is a monthly column exploring a new or rediscovered LGBTQIA+ film, and whether it deserves inclusion in an ever-growing “canon” of queer cinema. VV’s Castration Movie essay contains spoilers. Louise Weard’s film anthology features herself, Noah Baker and Alex Walton. Check out more movie coverage in the film essays section.

Superhero origin stories have been used as Trojan horses for introspective character studies about marginalized communities long before Vera Drew’s copyright-defying parody-meets-personal essay The People’s Joker (2022), but Castration Movie — which Drew also plays a supporting part in — very pointedly converses with it. The first of two feature-length halves in a project still only a third of the way filmed, “Incel Superman” opens with an extended monologue in which a frustrated production assistant (Noah Baker) waxes lyrical about the allegorical origins of the Man of Steel as a protector of the oppressed, just as war was breaking out in Europe. His passionate argument ends with him being asked, by a disinterested offscreen voice, what it is he’s talking about again, and it seems that Weard — the writer, director and star — is entirely disinterested in having her characters be viewed as anything more representative than distinctly flawed individuals.

Weard’s underground sensation is billed as a “post-modern epic about gender,” and Castration Movie is a punky triumph that explores the dark comedy and melancholy of contemporary trans lives in the margins of Vancouver. But the first chapter, comparatively underdiscussed next to the second (when Weard’s sex worker Traps is introduced), comprehensively reveals that the film is equally insightful about gender roles in the digital age when seemingly removed entirely from the same trans community living elsewhere in the city. It’s a more straightforward cringe comedy, a Gen Z Taxi Driver (1976) by way of Todd Solondz and Dogme 95, in which the insufferable Turner (Baker) gradually burns down every bridge in his life, spiraling into a drunken bender that brings him to the same 4Chan message board that Traps frequents. 

Castration Movie Essay: Related — Building the New Queer Canon #1: Isao Fujisawa’s ‘Bye Bye Love (Baibai Rabu)’

In a recent profile by The Guardian, Weard states that with this first Castration Movie story, she’s “training the audience how to watch the next section,” wanting to challenge viewers to find the shared humanity between a cis guy allured by the manosphere and an impoverished trans sex worker who could be a likely target. There have been so many dreadful prestige films over the years in which cishet characters learn to accept LGBTQ people that there’s something genuinely radical about seeing its inverse, designed to make a queer audience wonder if this is how the average homophobe or transphobe would feel when watching a well-intentioned but God-awful film like Dallas Buyers Club (2013). Castration Movie is frequently funny enough to never exist as a mere intellectual exercise; however, the film culminates with the worst Tinder date ever committed to screen — a gasp-inducing sequence that signals Weard could have a successful career writing studio comedies, if they still existed.

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The message board is the only connective tissue between the two tales, both of which are led by abrasive protagonists who never quite come to the realization that they’re not too far removed from the people they make fun of. Castration Movie does, of course, offer important representation at a time when governments worldwide are making it harder for trans people to access gender-affirming care, putting faces to the political decisions which are keeping them marginalized. But Weard’s masterstroke might be how she effectively conveys this without writing characters that could be viewed as positive figureheads for the community. Traps’ relationship and healthcare struggles are depicted empathetically and interchangeably with scenes where, for example, she badly attempts to coerce the men in her life into transitioning.

Castration Movie Essay: Related — Building the New Queer Canon #2: Bruce LaBruce’s ‘The Visitor’

Queer cinema far closer to the mainstream is becoming increasingly risk averse, largely responding to the authoritarian reach of the real world with uncomplicated, humane characterizations that seldom feel like genuine people. In Castration Movie, sequences which most other filmmakers would stage for nothing more than shock value — from unsimulated sex and water sports to the blunt aftermath of a character’s top surgery — are portrayed nonchalantly, demysticized through the conversational humor of the characters, finding organic ways to integrate them into the messy tapestry of modern queer life. The former is one of the ways the movie confronts the number of trans people who must rely on sex work to make a living, removing the few traces of glamour that are left when the most naive people consider the profession. 

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Castration Movie’s sex work sequences aren’t fun, but neither are they harrowing, standing in sharp contrast to Traps’ own relationship with a cis guy who clearly only views her as a fetish object and not a partner, which culminates in perhaps the most miserable sex scene I’ve ever seen with an audience. The film’s treatment and discussion of sexuality is matter-of-fact to the point of banality, creating a surprising amount of surreality (see a sequence where Traps and a friend discuss the unusual specifications of a client’s anatomy while a monitor in the background keeps auto-playing old YouTube clips, or when a polycule is torn apart because of one partner’s refusal to read Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune). This subculture, painted to a cis audience as radical by the media, features the same pop culture-themes conversations of a vintage Kevin Smith flick, complete with the same foul-mouthed flourish and DIY aesthetic.

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As for the act of gender transition itself — a fiercely debated, hot-button topic exclusively within the realms of a political right who couldn’t be less concerned with doing any medical research — a dinner table meetup between friends a few nights before a long-awaited top surgery is where Weard nails the balance of high and lowbrow. A personal moment about one man’s experience of having breasts quickly becomes a eulogy for breasts in general, using phrases that wouldn’t be found out of place in a mid-2000s Judd Apatow comedy. This is once again a sign that Weard’s comedic sensibility would thrive in another era, when there’d be a studio equivalent to this project that could help bring her to a wider audience. Admittedly, throwing in comparisons to the aforementioned Smith and Apatow may give the incorrect view that this is an analogue to their brands of gross-out comedy, which, if I’m being charitable, could be considered hetero-normative analogues to the likes of John Waters, branding Castration Movie as something of a full circle moment, since the similarities are due to the mix of unflinching vulgarity and surprising warmth. Weard just makes viewers crawl through a more vividly realized, even darker comic hell to get to that.

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Castration Movie opens with the infamous Norm MacDonald quote from Saturday Night Live (1975-) about the murder of trans man Brandon Teena: “This might strike some viewers as harsh, but I believe everybody involved in this story should die.” It’s a deliberately ironic use of the line, now frequently decontextualized through memes, which was typical of a time when gay and trans panic formed the only queer representation onscreen (it was also broadcast in the same release year (1994) of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective  — a film that hasn’t aged well because of its trans-themed jokes. Weard has affection for her characters in all their flaws, and that’s why Castration Movie is so fascinating in how it jointly functions as a comedy, humanizing characters that the genre has stereotypically made the butt of the joke, and without simplifying them as one-dimensional objects of empathy. Even in its incomplete form, with several hours still left to be screened, Weard’s anthology series is shaping up to be one of the decade’s most impactful queer texts.

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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