Cullen Arbaugh and Bradley Hildebrandt | Bram (Bräm) / 2025

the psycho

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cullen Arbaugh and Bradley Hildebrandt (screenwriters and directors) Bram/Bräm / 2025 [21 minutes]

 

Dalton (Ryan Maltz) has recently separated from his wife of five years and given up the custody of his two children, and his mother Fiona (Lucinda Holshue) decides, after a complete silence of three years, to pay a visit.

    There is certainly evidence that Fiona is a bit unstrung, calling her psychologist Dr. Armstrong-Steen regularly, and praising herself for only having one drink on the plane trip to Minneapolis, but even a totally calm and collected being might be a little taken aback by the man Dalton has taken to be his boyfriend, Bram (Bradley Hildebrandt).

     He met Bram, it appears, when working as a corrections officer in the local prison, Bram being not a fellow worker, but a prisoner who, we soon discover, accidently killed his parents through his meth lab in the basement, which, while he went out for cigarettes, exploded, killing all within.   Bram, moreover, is not a particularly handsome man, but an effeminate, if seemingly gentle being who slinks about somewhat like a petulant cat about to pounce at any moment.

    Bram begins their relationship by correcting the way his name is pronounced, Bräm (with the umlaut), not the flat Americanized Bram as Fiona keeps repeating, and proceeds to make Dalton’s mother a stiff drink of mixed liquors.

     The two, Bram and Dalton sit together, kissing one another for long periods of time as if Fiona were absent. Fiona is also disturbed that Bram has redecorated nearly every wall with gay flags, drawings, and other gay insignias and pictures.

     One of the joys of the film is attempting to determine whose reality to believe, the foreboding world that Fiona seems to recognize in Bram, a danger that seems all too real and present; or the fact that Bram is a lovely person, the right man for her son, but that Fiona is close to a nervous breakdown.

     She certainly appears that way as she hears through the airduct the sexual encounter between her son and Bram, one of whom intensely fucks the other—with Crisco, which suggests perhaps a far deeper fuck than the usual insertion of just the penis.

     By film’s end, Fiona proves the true unstrung patient, her doctor Armstrong-Steen suggesting a higher dosage of what the mother already believes is giving her hallucinations, while the two young gay men, as strange a combination as they appear to be, are simply attempting to provide her with a comfortable visit.     If there is a psycho is this moral fable it is the heterosexual mother, not the oddly matched gay couple, who seem happily in love.

     This still remains a quite strange work, however, with some very creepy possibilities. At times we half expect Bram to pounce, strangling her from years of resentment of others of her kind, homophobes who desperately attempt to affect love and acceptance.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).