Aaron Schoonover | Rabbit Hole / 2023

the mad mother

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aaron Schoonover (screenwriter and director) Rabbit Hole / 2023 [25 minutes]

 

Blake is a good kid, a studious boy who might have gone off to college had not his father died and his mother quit her nursing job. But kid Blake (Nate Frison) now works as a dash-food delivery boy to support his mother Denise (Catherine Curtin) and pay for his own on-line college classes.

    It’s a difficult life, but he obviously feels he owes to his mother who still loves him at a time when he is in the process of sexual coming out. But what do you do if you mother has also somehow been infected with online QAnon lunacy, believing that President John Kennedy was assassinated, and that at age 103 he will be joining the soon-to-be-elected President Trump as Vice President. Even though she has worked as a nurse she is totally against vaccines, and, even worse than her social and political views which, as this film’s title suggests, have truly taken her down the “rabbit hole,” she has begun sending “donations” to her on-line causes assuring her, she reports, of her son and her salvation when the revolution comes.

    For his part, Blake goes stolidly about his business, trying to make sure his mother remembers to eat, while finding it almost impossible to discuss any reality with her at this point in her life; but sending money that they don’t have to her crack-pot causes is almost too much for an 18-year-old boy to bear.

    On one of his restaurant-runs, he encounters a high school peer, Dom (Drake Tobias). They didn’t hang out together in high school, but vaguely recognize now that they are perhaps both gay and are clearly attracted to one another; after all there aren’t many choices in their small Ohio town.

    Dom reports, however, that he is soon moving to New York City, just for the gay life, he jokes. The realization that one of the few potential friends will disappear from his life, Blake is crestfallen, obviously feeling even more alone in a world of near insanity that so clearly depresses our young hero; but momentarily, at least, he is uplifted by Dom’s invite to stop over one afternoon and “just hang out.”

    Whereas, Blake’s home is filled with boxes filled stuffed to documents on god knows what—evidence perhaps of pizzagate and other imagined atrocities—the house needing more than a heavy cleaning, Dom lives in a spiffy suburban mansion with his parents (Mary Beth Baxley and Jason Tait) who are friendly and open-minded, evidently well aware of their son’s sexuality and in full acceptance of his new friend.  

     The boys get on well, with Dom even suggesting, out of the blue, that Blake should join him in an apartment in New York. But with so much on his mind, Blake demurs, and not much happens of special afternoon get together but a few friendly moments of conversation and relaxation. Yet, upon Blake’s leave-taking he suddenly kisses Dom, the latter a bit taken aback simply because, as he puts it, “I wasn’t sure that’s what you wanted.” He invites him back into the basement den where they apparently have sex.

      A few days later, after taking a test online for one of his courses, Blake shows up in the room where his mother stays tune at nearly hours of the day and night to her QAnon networks, he shows up wearing a mask. She is startled.

     He reports that he has tested himself and discovered he has Covid. She forces him to take off the mask, and refuses to believe it until he reports that Dom and a family member have also tested positive.

     Denise goes into full-mode of the out-of-date and ineffective preventives: vitamin pills and other meaningless protections supported by people like our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. or perhaps even wilder than the quack methods he might propose to cure the killer disease.

     Blake, however, tells her not to be too worried since he’s been vaccinated. The mention of that word stops her babble as she attempts to take in the reality that while she is certain that vaccinations are dangerous and unhealthy—she suddenly even claims to feel some symptoms of an imaginary disease she has caught from her son’s contagion—but that her son has chosen through is own consultation with on-line doctors and scientists to go against everything she has come to believe. She immediately orders him out of the house.

    Fortunately, Dom and his parents are only too happy to welcome him into their home, and after a bit of brooding, Blake begins to open up to joy, sharing experiences with his new friend like enjoying family dinners, snuggling up to Dom, letting his friend paint his finger nails, and even running together with him through the rain just like all film gay boys do when they are happy and in love. Too bad Ohio doesn’t have an ocean beach for them to race across, the most common trope lately, I’ve noticed, to signify queer love, but they do have a pond!

 

   Soon after he begins to live with Dom, he agrees to join him in his move to New York City, and they begin to check the internet to find a Brooklyn apartment where they live together.

     Blake, in short, is saved by is own mother’s loss of mind; when he returns home to pick up some clothes and other things left behind, he finds that she’s gone to for a QAnon gathering in Youngstown, but is reminded by his absent mother via cellphone that he should be out of the house by the time she returns.

     By that time Blake and Dom are driving off to their new lives where they agree just to be friends in order evidently to be able to fully sexually discover themselves in their new shared world.

     Rabbit Hole is not truly that interesting as yet another gay coming-of-age movie except for it’s wacky QAnon angle. But even that odd element might have been far better handled if director Aaron Shoonover had expended a bit more of the film’s rather shallow love story by showing us how a fairly normal human being working to help heal others gradually crawls into unreal shadow world from she can no longer escape. What are the psychological issues that help create the state of mind that suddenly requires a switch from logic into a weird confusion of vaguely rightest religious issues, pedophilic hysteria, demonic theories, and conspiracy plots so twisted that even a sci-fi or political/adventure filmmakers couldn’t imagine them as possible filmscripts.

     Clearly from the evidence we have about the gay love story Schoonover vaguely points to, he doesn’t have the full cinematic skills to explore anything too deeply. As Schoonover himself noted in an interview on Script:

 

“I knew I wanted to do a queer coming-of-age story, but as I was outlining and coming up with ideas, everything felt like a little derivative of like things we've seen before. And then I happened, funnily enough, to be on TikTok, and I saw someone posted a screengrab of a Reddit thread called QAnon casualties. And it was this really sad story of this man recounting what his wife was going through with QAnon, a very intense spiral. And I was like, ‘This is a movie, and why hasn't this been made yet?’”

 

    When your Eureka moment comes from TikTok and Reddit, you don’t have a lot of room, I guess, to flesh out a truly sincere exploration of character behavior. Blake is a sad gay boy who comes out of his shell through his lunatic mother’s rection and that, in a nutshell, is the “grab.”

     That said, the whirl of images around it are certain to creak as they do in this film that might have been so emotionally startling as a drama or even a wildly bizarre comedy. As it stands, this movie, sorry to report, is basically a bore.

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).