Kyle Reaume | Ecstasy / 2016

emblem of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kyle Reaume (screenwriter and director) Ecstasy / 2016 [5 minutes]

 

In this wordless drama by Kyle Reaume, a handsome young man (Justin Miller) sits at a bar alone drinking. For a long while, given the short five-minute length of this emblematic representation of ecstasy, the camera simply focuses face-on with the ruminating man.

    In the corner we see another two men, obviously a couple, the one standing (Harrison Reynolds), whispering over the shoulder of the other (Kyle Reaume).

     The film interjects a similar scene of the standing figure and the lone man in a similar position which we immediately perceive to be from some time earlier. Again the camera returns to the lonely drinker, who finally stands, moves over to the couple, pushes the lover out of the way and knocks the man standing to the floor, the film once again returning us to a moment between the two of them as they fall together to a bed, suddenly in a similar position where the one in the passive position moves into dominance, likely in the earlier manifestation, for a deep kiss.

 

     But this time, on the bar floor, he has raised a fist into the air where he hovers for a few seconds before coming down crashing into the face of his former lover, blood issuing from the ex-lover’s nose and mouth. Yet a smile remains on his face, even as the fist goes crashing into him once again. He is apparently in ecstasy over the possibility of once more coming into bodily contact with the man he loved.

     Love, unfortunately, is often like that, particularly if after the lovers break from one another, one cannot completely abandon the transformative feelings of affection; the pain is all that is left to remind him of the joy he once felt, and he keeps the pain close to him for that for reason. Violence becomes the only possible way to express what once was the ecstasy of love.

    I should add that without the incessantly repetitive and driven musical score by Emily Klassen this short work would not have nearly the same effect.

 

Los Angeles, November 27, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).