Wayne Tunks | According to Otto / 2025

coming out in a blender

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wayne Tunks (screenwriter and director) According to Otto / 2025

 

On the day of this feature film, Otto Brooks (Jasper Musgrave, looking several years older than his teen character he portrays) is turning 16 and is determined finally to come out to his parents, Gavin (Wayne Tunks) and Corrine (Jacinta Moses), his sister, Ava (Tasha O’Brien), and his physically impaired, mostly demented grandmother, Lesley (Felicity Burke).

     Although Otto claims his Australian family is rather normal—his father working for “blah-blah-blah,” his mother a librarian who regularly holds her finger to mouth in a sign of quietude, his sister attending Uni where she is majoring in everything having to do with sex, and his grandmother basically a basket case—one might describe them all as rather intensely deranged, allowing the quiet, handsome young Otto plenty of room for his comic satire of their reaction to his announcement.

    On the surface, however, his confession doesn’t seem to go too badly. After a few blinks, his father readily embraces his son’s homosexuality, his sister Ava almost being proud to have a gay brother about whom she can gossip with her bisexual male friend and mindlessly placid female confidant, Cloud.

    But his mother has problems, not being able to immediately embrace the term “gay” as applied to a boy so young who has never even had a sexual experience. As many a movie parent in just such a situation, she challenges her son, “how to do you know you’re gay when you haven’t even slept with a woman?” Other than the fact that her mother seems to be suggesting that he should have had sex before turning 16, his sister cogently queries her mother, whether had she slept with another woman or had her father slept with another man in order to realize that they were really straight before they met another? the question quite emphatically being answered by “absolutely not.” Point made.

    Otto assures them that he simply knows that he’s gay.

    But logic, obviously, has little to do with the emotions such a statement arouses in a mother, and she clearly needs time to come to terms with the news.

    The grandmother, however, offers up the most comic of reactions by rousing herself up to say, “Ellen is a homosexual” (presumably referring to Ellen DeGeneres), and continues throughout most of the rest of the movie to name celebrity gay individuals, including Elton John, Freddie Mercury, Ian McKellen, Jodie Foster, Martina Navratilova, along with numerous others, a standing joke spoken at the most inopportune moments that provides more laughs than nearly any of the other comic situations.

     Not that writer/director Tunks doesn’t give it his best, bringing into this “coming out” film elements of almost every gay film trope that has ever existed including Otto’s almost losing his best friend and romantic interest, Max Lester (Brendan Paul), who greets the news with a denial that he’s gay, resulting in a breakup with his friend before Max finally comes to terms with his sexuality and his love of Otto; a bevy of school bullies headed by a brain dead jock, Brady Symons (Cooper Mortlock); a schoolteacher who comes into her own when she discovers she finally has a gay student in her class; the mother’s sullen Asian assistant, Simon Lee (Andrew Wang) who turns out to be a well-known drag queen; along with various fantasies of the boy’s gay wedding.

      Otto’s wise-cracking, pain-in-the-ass sister suddenly transforms into his best friend and supporter. The lug of a businessman father becomes a true force for gay rights when he confronts the school principal about their “pretend” policies against bullying after his son his slugged in the face. And even the father’s “office-wife” (Renee Lim) becomes a celebrant, joining a brass band and the sorrowful bully in the end (who for the first time puts together more words than he ever has in his life to explain that his homophobia probably has to do with problems undefined sexuality) as nearly the whole town eventually sing the joys of Otto’s brave coming out, with even his mother realizing just how much she loves the boy she has raised.

     Just because of the overlaying of so very many gay genres we almost lose sight of the “coming out” story. Otto instead becomes a kind of fill-in-the-blank symbol of every stereotypical image ever conjured up about gay boys and men. Some friends suggest that Mr. and Mrs. Brooks will now have a wit to entertain them, and at some moments when Otto challenges his bully, he almost conquers his fears with his sharply-laced tongue; others congratulate the mother for having someone to help with her clothes and accessories, and given the boxy suits she wears throughout the film, we wouldn’t be surprised if Otto might even be able to accomplish that task if she’d let him.

    But the most difficult challenge that Otto now faces is convincing the boy he was once in love with to at least remain his best friend. As I suggest above, not only is that mission accomplished but Max is freed of his fears by the recognition that someone has actually been loving him all along.

    And then, there’s the wacky Alzheimer’s suffering grandmother who manages to bring to mind the names of so many gay figures: “Alexander the Great was gay,” she finally roars out, Otto suggesting for the first time that she’s not completely correct, since he most likely was “bi.”

    This is an often silly but still loveable film, first presented on stage as a play in Australia back in 2018, where it probably played much more smoothly than the rather lumpen series of cinematic scenes into which Tunks has edited it. Still, it’s fun just seeing all your favorite gay scenes tossed into the blender like a tropical fruit drink that goes down rather sweetly without any particular sense of taste.

 

Los Angeles, December 22, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).