Daniel Yaqo | Heartdrop / 2025

 drop it

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Yaqo and Matt Latreille (screenplay), Daniel Yaqo (director) Heartdrop / 2025 [17.25 minutes]

 

Alas, we’ve seen this movie so very many times. Dylan (Daniel Yaqo) and Max (Will Trineer) live in a small Canadian town and are quite clearly in love. Yet Max, the town jock, doesn’t at all feel that he can possibly acknowledge even a friendship with Dylan, who lives evidently across the street from him.

    Early in the film we see Dylan bicycle over to soccer practice just get a glimpse of his idol who can’t even wave a hello and needs to covertly send him a message on his cell phone. Dylan returns home without even a real-life moment of interchange, watching Max’s buddies deliver him back home late at 2:00 in the morning, after what was probably an evening of drinking and camaraderie, once again without the man who loves him by his side.

     We can see it all coming, what usually happens in such works. Dylan will spend the night and many another unhappily, all alone.  In this short work they keep sending silly photos back and forth as if that might serve as a relationship.

    We do observe a short afternoon and evening at the river or lake when they actually talk, kiss, chase after one another, and skip rocks across the water—you know, do what all gay boys do in these movies when they’re in love. But they soon go back to photographing one another, although time actually bothering to snap one of them together, and sending them back and forth as if they were talking.

     Once they return to their neighborhood, Max insists Daniel wait until he enters his house before showing himself on the block, a clue as if we didn’t have enough evidence already, that this relationship simply isn’t going to work if Daniel want’s to live an ordinary life instead of hiding out in shame.

     Yaqo’s work, however, makes the inevitable even worse, by constantly interrupting the visual narrative with a voice-over describing events as if the director can’t quite believe in his own power to portray events visually. The very fact that the narrative voice clearly is telling us a story of the past already makes it quite clear that their growing friendship did not survive, as if underlining the obvious and oft told plot just so the filmmaker can be sure we get the meaning of what is about to be “said”—all of which seems almost ludicrous when the narrator momentarily describes their growing relation as being “like a book you can’t put down, where every chapter brings a new revelation,” using a literary cliché to reiterate the already the clichéd of film’s plot. Believe me, I could put this “book” down.

    It becomes even worse, so the voice tells us, as they “remain in a gray zone of friendship, an undefined space where certainty and doubt danced in a delicate balance.” Some one should tell Yaqo that purple prose of worn-out tropes does not help keep a film afloat.

      Surprise: Suddenly Max disappears.

    Six months later he shows up, girl in hand, in the café where Dylan is working, the barista demanding immediately to know where he has been. Max plays dumb, seemingly having utterly no knowledge of who Dylan is or what he is talking about. “Who are you?” he blankly asks.

       But even after Dylan pretends it’s all been a mistake, and the couple sit down in the cute café, his girlfriend (Idaya Bello) clearly recognizes the tension between the two. And when Max won’t even explain that it existed, she leaves in anger, Max following her out.

       Soon after, Dylan receives a cellphone message to meet the amnesiac Max at the boardwalk, he needs to explain.

        By this time, I would have certainly turned off the phone, deleted the message, and gone back to work. But, of course, we’re curious where possibly this young director thinks he might take us now that we’ve reached a dead end.

        Max vaguely attempts apologize and even claim that, despite the fact that he was seeing the girl even while he was with Dylan, that straight relationship is now over and that he needs Dylan and is ready to move forward. But even this barista isn’t that stupid. He walks away from the offer of staring all over again.

        Still, our director can’t even leave the obvious alone at this point, tacking on yet another voice-over lecturette: “I learned that love should never be a question of convenience or experimentation for someone else. It should be a shared journey, not a solo quest dressed up as a duo.”

        If only the director had followed the advice of that last sentence when he made this little ditty, we might have kept his audience from walking away from his work just his characters have from one another.   

     

Los Angeles, November 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blot (November 2025).