Halo Rossetti | Pony / 2022

necessary changes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Halo Rossetti (screenwriter and director) Pony / 2022 [15 minutes]

 

This film is a kind of transgender fantasy in which a young girl, Zoe (Jayden Rolling) is desperate to become the male that her twin brother Tony wanted to be in his secret desire to become a female named Pony.

    The poor mother (Mandy May Cheetham) in left after what appears to have been the suicide of her Tony/Pony, with a daughter who clearly is unhappy in her own skin, terrified that the surviving twin will also do harm to herself.

     The film grows even more problematic as Zoe’s best friend Kayle (Emi Curia) begins to fall in love with the far more male-identifying Zoe, mistaking her behavior as being lesbian.

      The movie begins with Zoe locked away in the bathroom about to cut off her long pony tail, the mother banging on the door, terrified that her daughter also might be in the process of harming herself.

      Unfortunately, director Halo Rossetti doesn’t know quite how to logically express the transgender feelings of her central character, and hasn’t a clue in how to develop Zoe’s character or explain much of anything about her brother Tony except through a brief clip of the boy putting on eyeliner in his own attempt apparently at gender transformation. How he came to feel he was a girl in a boy’s body or why this ended in his death is not explained.

      All we get is a shrine in the garage that Zoe has created for her brother, and bits and pieces of her mother’s desperate attempts to recreate some sense of normalcy.

       When Zoe reveals her secret shrine to Kayley, the girl finally comes out, so to speak, declaring her love of Zoe. But when Zoe takes it several levels further describing her brother as her sister and herself as a boy, things grow so strange that she runs off in terror.

       Somehow, so it appears, Zoe conveys the truth to her mom, and finally cuts most of her long braided pony tale off. But the films ends there, with no sense of resolution of full explanation, and no clue about how much the mother knows of her daughter’s resolution to become a male or how she might feel about it.

       And frankly, although it is certainly intriguing, is rather unbelievable that both twins would have felt born into the wrong gender bodies, as if they were magically switched in the womb.

       By film’s end we still don’t know how anybody involved is truly dealing with the radical changes the film seems to broadcast. Does Kayley come to accept her best friend as a male? Is the mother able to accept, after her son’s death, such a transformation of her daughter? And is Zoe herself ready to undergo the long transformation from female to male? It seems almost as if the author/director, who identifies as non-binary, had not yet thought enough about how the radically  new identity Zoe is ready to embrace might affect those around they/them.

     I can only report that the mother appears to be almost a saint, having suffered and loved through it all. Has she also lost her husband in the process? Once again, nothing is fully explained. But in the final shot, Zoe is able to chop off her locks.

 

Los Angeles, April 15, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).