Rudi Cunningham | What You Need / 2025

ready, await

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rudi Cunningham (screenwriter and director) What You Need / 2025 [14 minutes]

 

What You Need is yet another student film—this one from Queen’s University, Belfast—wherein the central character is having difficulty in deciding to come out, this despite the fact that as the film begins that figure, Elliot (James Hayes), has just visited a gay bar with his friend Rob (Jarlath Burns).

    Rob, with turquoise fingernails, gently paints just one of Elliot’s nails, more of an excuse to hold his hand, perhaps, in both senses of that word: to help him relax into the inevitable decision he must make, but also to maybe just stimulate the cute boy enough to join him in sex.

    The two, in fact, move toward that goal, Elliott enjoying, evidently Rob’s exploring fingers, but

at the last moment when the investigation might be sealed with a kiss, Elliott once more pulls back, embarrassingly admitting that he’s still “not ready yet.”

    Besides, he queries, what would Matt think?—that individual evidently being Rob’s lover. Rob assures him that not everything need be known, but also begs him never to say anything about his attempts at love-making. Rob takes his leave, with Elliott realizing that he has to do some heavy thinking.

    Over the next couple of days, he mopes around and washes his face off with cold water, as the sexually undecided or simply confused gay boys are wont to do in such films. But it’s clear he has come to a decision, yet receives no phone reply from Rob, who vaguely texts that he’s having some issues with Matt.

    Finally, in a natural space in the woods the two meet up again, Elliott confessing that he finally is ready to act. Sadly, Rob must tell him that Matt his found a job in Australia. There is a long pause. “And he wants me to go with him.”

    As a tear drops down Elliott’s cheek, he congratulates his friend on the good luck of being able to travel and seek out a new life down under. But it is also clear that the door he has so long been waiting to open has now just been shut in his face.

    Rob stands and begins to walk away, turning back for a few seconds in what we sentimentalists might hope is a restorative gesture, a change of mind or heart. But director Cunningham’s short film has been far too honest to employ such a trick. He turns and walks away, leaving Elliott, back to the viewer, to suffer his own sorrow for having waited so long to realize what he needed to do for his personal happiness.

    Surely he may eventually find someone else, but that isn’t the point. At the moment he is the loneliest young man on the planet, again afraid of a future which he has finally grown ready to explore.

    This story isn’t new, but it is so well acted and generally well directed, with beautiful frames of its characters and their spaces, that we almost forget that it is a student work. And even if we might have grown tired of the young boys dithering on the ledge before the necessary leap into life, we realize the possibility of falling still terrorizes most young men.

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).