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.
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).
