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 Blue Film essay contains spoilers. Elliot Tuttle’s 2025 movie features Kieron Moore and Reed Birney. Check out more movie coverage in the film essays section.

As was the case with Kristoffer Borgli’s provocative box office sensation The Drama (2026), the basic premise of Blue Film — revealed within the first 20 minutes — is being treated as a spoiler, purposefully hidden from all marketing materials. Writer/director Elliot Tuttle’s second feature has been positioned as a mystery box, promising something incendiary enough that several major festivals (including Sundance and SXSW) rejected it outright on the basis of its subject matter. If you’ve seen any marketing for the film online, you might assume this is because it boasts a frank portrayal of gay sex work and kink that proved too explicit for the tastes of America’s festival programmers; any audience member hoping that’s the case will be met with the cinematic equivalent of a cold shower. Blue Film is one of the more morally challenging films of recent memory, daring the audience to find empathy for a man who has desires he can’t fully atone for, and probing where the line should be when it comes to exploring sexual taboos.

Typically, when critics describe performances as “brave,” it’s a euphemism for an actor willing to physically bare all onscreen. And with a vague knowledge of the sex work subject matter, you might think I’m alluding to the same thing by describing Blue Film’s two leads in the same way. First-time performer Kieron Moore plays fetish camboy Aaron Eagle, a verbal dom who demands his submissive followers worship his every move with lucrative tips in exchange for nudity. He’s been approached by a mysterious follower to meet him, with the promise of $25,000 if he agrees to an on-camera interview with a masked older man, played by Reed Birney. The footage will never be published anywhere; Aaron just wants to find out more about the real man behind the facade.

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Even before the mysterious man reveals his intentions, Tuttle’s screenplay plays with fire. Questioned about his sexual awakening and how he became a dom camboy, Aaron delivers an extended anecdote about a drugged-up three-way where one of the other participants had a CNC (Consensual Non-Consent) fetish, begging him to brutally assault them. It’s hardly a niche fetish (one scroll of the Grindr grid and you’ll find at least one user looking for a willing partner), but even within an intimate interview, Aaron refuses to drop the facade, appearing to say just what his high-paying customer wants to hear in the most boundary-crossing terms. And even then, the fetish itself isn’t the provocation, so much as what Tuttle places it in direct conversation with, as the man removes his mask and reveals himself to be Hank Grant — Aaron’s former middle-school teacher who was fired over accusations that he abused one of his students.

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Despite how this may sound, Blue Film isn’t interested in kink-shaming Aaron by comparing his experiences to that of a criminal sex offender, and the film would be far less interesting if it aimed to conservatively suggest some moral equivalence between acts distinguishably consensual and non-consensual. Instead, when seen from the perspective of a sex worker whose clients have extreme requests, the extended conversation between the two plays out as something closer to a therapy session. Hank confesses early on that Aaron’s 12-year-old self was the unrequited love of his life, and that despite his firing and arrest, he never once acted on his perversion because he was aware of the moral implications. This is the closest thing to an olive branch extended to the audience, and even this is covered in thorns. Since being released from jail, Hank became a born-again Christian, convinced that as God made him a pedophile, he should be proud of being a “pervert,” rather than shamefully seeing it as a cross to bear. It’s a bewilderingly alien perspective which feels even more uncomfortable due to the empathy with which Birney approaches the character; any sensationalism is played down, even as Hank starts brainstorming ways his sex worker companion can help indulge his proclivities without breaking any laws.

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The most challenging aspect of Blue Film comes down to the narrative optics. The far-right have long tried to clamp down on LGBTQ+ rights by painting queer people as sex offenders looking to indoctrinate and abuse children. With those people currently holding power, it’s easier to defend a tone-deaf queer movie when it aims to empathetically explore the headspace of a self-confessed pedophile and whether the individual can live a full life within society’s boundaries. But queer cinema has been defined by transgression for as long as there has been queer cinema, and there is no period where Blue Film could have felt comfortable upon arrival. The moral knottiness is integral to the story, and the film is effective because it doesn’t feel like the writer/director shamelessly tries to upset audiences by making them sit in the murkiness.

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Blue Film isn’t comparable to Todd Solondz’ Happiness (1998), which depicts a pedophile’s attempts to assault his young son’s best friend in the style of a warped sitcom. If anything, Tuttle’s movie is more extreme because it doesn’t allow for any release of tension via dark laughs, or present itself as a subversion of something more wholesome. Instead, Blue Film tasks the audience with sitting in a headspace that will be unfathomable to most and upsetting for just as many, as the transgression is that Tuttle allows a sex offender to articulate their innermost fears and desires while asking the audience to reserve further judgement. There’s no distasteful attempt to normalize this either. Aaron’s perspective keeps viewers at a remove, and his inquisitive approach to hearing Hank out doesn’t fully restrain him from judgment, as Moore’s character tries to assess the moral boundaries of working with his former teacher as a client.

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Tuttle’s juxtaposition of empathy and a refusal to sanitize the worst excesses of a criminal headspace feels highly reminiscent of Nicole Kassell’s The Woodsman, an underseen 2004 film in which Kevin Bacon plays a pedophile readjusting to civilian life after a 12-year prison stint. It’s one of the actor’s strongest performances for the same reason that Birney’s is so remarkably unshakable in Blue Film, as Bacon matter-of-factly portrays a sex offender who is self-aware about the human cost of acting on his darkest impulses, albeit one kept in a chokehold by those desires. The Woodsman is effective as a drama because it probes the limits of audience empathy, neither condemning nor letting its protagonist off the hook. But unlike Blue Film, Kassell’s 2004 movie wasn’t ignored by the Sundance Film Festival because it dares to take a mature approach to a taboo without resorting to instant condemnation.

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Blue Film and The Woodsman operate from a similar position of trying to understand the headspace of a sex offender, and whether they can be rehabilitated back into society when they can’t simply turn off their desires. Placing that exploration within a kink context, as Tuttle’s film does, initially seems like a moralistic attempt at kink-shaming, tarring anybody with sexual fantasies outside the norm with the same brush used to condemn the most indefensible. But that would be taking the easier route, simplifying its worldview to the point of offering an easily digestible lesson for audiences, as distasteful as that perspective might be. Blue Film doesn’t want to simplify either of its leads into being a lightning rod for audience scorn, and that’s why it’s hard to shake; beneath the transgression, there’s a thoughtful look at the moral limitations of human sexuality and whether the worst extremes can be modified into something non-criminal. It’s provocative, certainly, but never feels like cheap exploitation, even in its most lurid moments. Blue Film is a conversation starter for anybody brave enough to hear it out.

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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