Gordon Hickey | The Cure / 2021

a moral dilemma

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gordon Hickey (screenwriter and director) The Cure / 2021 [15 minutes]

 

If you’ve ever wanted a gay hero who one day suddenly realizes that there are evil forces in the world that are determined to see him dead, then The Cure is the movie for you. In 15 minutes, Hickey tells the exciting story of a man, Craig Gaffney (played by the author and director), a top researcher of what appears to be a cure for AIDS, who discovers that more than half of the patients who have been showing strong signs of being free from the disease have died overnight. The woman who reports this too him, the clinic head Tanya (Sally Elsbury), tells him that he has simply been too optimistic about the so-called “cure.” He should go home and rest.

   Shocked by the news, Gaffney determines to stay on at work and look further into what has inexplicably happened to the patients whose plasma had tested to be free of and immune to the the disease but suddenly turned positive overnight.

     A coffee break meeting with a friend Cillian (Conor Clear) reveals that a plane load of scientists on their way to an AIDS conference in Sydney, among them a group from Ireland where this film takes place, has just crashed over Armenia, killing all aboard. Cillian suggests the he should immediately illegally download all the data about his research, even though no one is permitted to take the data outside of the institute in which he works. There are obviously a great many pharmaceutical companies who would lose millions if a cure where to be found.

     Secretly, Gaffney downloads the data on a portable memory stick, hiding it in a piece of cake he has brought to work so that he get through the security check. He even offers the piece of the cake to the guard, who fortunately, worried about his weight, refuses it.

    But once he has returned to the streets he notices someone following him, and soon goes on the run, the hitman (Brian Moore) on the chase after him.

      After numerous blocks on the run, our hero darts into a parking structure, hiding between two cars as the hitman, now with gun in hand, carefully checks out the autos behind which Gaffney is hiding. Ultimately, Gaffney has no choice to but to grab the hitman and strangle him (we’ve watched our hero in training early in the movie). He kills the man, shocked and in tears by his own necessary actions.

      When the dead man’s cellphone rings, he answers it only to hear Tanya’s voice at the other end, checking up to see if the deed of killing him has been completed, forcing Gaffney to realize that his whole project has now been jeopardized by individuals within clearly determined to bring a stop to the possible salvation of gay men throughout the world.

      Back on the street again, his own cellphone rings, his lover Pablo (Joe Vivas) begging him to return home. Gaffney reports that he can’t currently do that, but a quick intercut to the caller shows him surrounded by men with a knife at his neck. Pablo responds: “They’re here.” And suddenly Gaffney with the thumb disk in one hand and the phone in the other is forced to make a decision between possibly saving his lover or saving gay men throughout the world.

    The credits immediately follow without resolving the impossible choice between love of an individual and love of mankind, the kind of choices forced upon us by fascists and men of hate since the beginning of time.

      This is a truly wonderful short film that should most definitely me remade into a full feature where its revelations might be played out in a more subtle and horrifying manner, the way Hitchcock and other great directors of action films slowly unveil the necessity of making such grand moral decisions as toy with audience awareness. But even at the unbelievably fast pace of this breathless 15-minute thriller Hickey has quite brilliantly caught our attention from the earliest scenes to the last seconds when the realization of the horrific decision with which the film’s hero is faced creates the moment of stasis when the picture must take a breath to force us to see precisely what is at stake.

      By film’s end, we know that there is now no capitulation: were Gaffney to return home, they would likely kill both him and his lover and end any possibility of a cure from the world-wide

epidemic. As film critic Vito Russo long made clear in his 1981 seminal study: in a world of homophobia, large or small, gay men are always destined to die.

 

Los Angeles, December 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).