Sean Lìonadh | Too Rough / 2022

shift of power

by Douglas Messerli

Sean Lìonadh (screenwriter and director) Too Rough / 2022 [15 minutes]

 

To call the family at the center of Scottish director Sean Lìonadh’s short film Too Rough as dysfunctional, as does the IMDb site, is almost an understatement. These people, an alcoholic couple with a mentally challenged child (James McCarry, Kevin O’Loughlin, and Tomas Palmer) are a disaster zone of hate and total destruction. How their son Nick (Ruaridh Mollica) has even survived all these years to celebrate at a party when evidently his parents are out of town, is almost inexplicable.

     How have they fed him? Can either of these parents even hold down a job? The only salvation for Nick’s younger challenged brother is that he cannot comprehend the meaning of the words that come pouring from their lungs during their violent shouting matches. That child, Flamingo, is only frightened and hides out in a closet.

      Nick is equally terrified, but it is because he knows all too well what his father and mother are saying, their hatred for one another, their homophobic slurs, and, at one point, so we perceive what his father’s drunken toppings of his body indicate. Whether the latter has actually resulted in sexual abuse is uncertain, but after we observe this one afternoon, we can imagine anything having happened in the past.

      What’s different this time, is that after the party Nick has fallen into the arms of his boyfriend Charlie (Joshua Griffin) at the party, and wakes up in bed with him as his parents return. We cannot quite discern whether Nick’s absolute terror of the situation is the fear of the consequences of being discovered with a black boy in bed which might surely result in beatings or even murder; or whether he is more terrified that Charlie will discover the full truth about his family and reject him out of hand. In any event, hysteria sets in, with Charlie mostly refusing to play along, arguing that he will not hide under the bed like Anne Frank.

      Yet he does piss in a glass instead of daring to use the bathroom, and leap to the side of the bed when Nick’s father, in the midst of his violent argument, enters and lays down on top of his son, whispering of his love into his son’s ear. The presence of Flamingo, however, distracts him, and he leaves, the fight between the parents continuing for a while before it finally settles down.

      When Nick again demands Charlie leave, he refuses. He is now there to protect his lover and rejects the very idea that he might abandon him to the horrors of his own home. Just as Nick holds his little brother’s ears so that cannot hear the full-pitch battle, so too does Charlie hold Nick’s ears.

     The couple finally kiss, Nick suddenly realizing a new sense of peace in having Charlie’s support instead of fear and absolute disgust.

                          

     Things do finally quiet, and the boys, together, move forward into the living room where the discover the battling couple drunkenly asleep in one another’s arms. Nick picks up his mother and moves her in another, more comfortable, direction, while Charlie, observing the oven smoking, pulls out the burned meal she had begun to prepare. Together they sit, holding hands, perhaps waiting for the horrors to awaken or just watching over them, realizing that it is they who are now in control, not the out-of-control drunkards. With Charlie there to help support him, Nick can finally put an end to his own version of hiding out in the closet.

 

Los Angeles, December 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).