Kyle Sims | Our Boy / 2019

boy escaped

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kyle Sims (screenwriter and director) Our Boy / 2019 [14 minutes]

 

I sympathize with the vast gathering of film information the IMDb site does each year, and salute them for their attempts. But clearly in such vast archives they also make many mistakes of both titles and film release dates, both of which truly matter in film research. In this case, they mistakenly titled the move as “The Boy” when in fact it is Our Boy which effects how it gets catalogued elsewhere and how it is represented in call ups on Google and other information sites.

    In this instance, Letterboxd corrected for their mistake, but often because of such misidentification information does not appear elsewhere, the film is lost among the many others of the year.

     Our Boy also suffered from critical misapprehension, most critics and commentators seeing it as a kind of surreal horror tale in the manner of Shirley Jackson, although the best of them could only point in the direction of Twilight Zone, instead of simply being able to read it as a quite obvious metaphorical tale of what most generations do to their youth, first binding them to their home tethers, before crippling them so that they have no way of escaping the world of their already quite crippled elders. In this eerie version, they literally go through a kind of sacred ceremony at the age of “the boy’s” (Ryan Herzog) maturity, bathing him as he is tearfully bid farewell to his open youth by his mother (Christine Herzog) before the entire family, father and neighbors, all represented by equally crippled, horrific adults who are convinced to maintain the status quo by repeating their parent’s demands that they insure the child cannot enter the world as a full, healthy human being able to walk and run away on his own.

     Writer director Sims creates such a horrific force of elderly demons who gather round the innocent to watch the actual hammer breaking his knee which will result in the symbolical crippling, that the film does take on the dimensions of a surreal horror film. But after all, most our parents far more easily accomplished that task regarding so very many of their children through life-long lessons, refusals and rejections, and endlessly repeated negative denials that it should hardly surprise us to see it condensed into such a simple metaphorical act of crippling.

     Film Threat reviewer Matthew Roe, I have to give him credit, was honest enough to share his shifting viewpoints of what he was seeing:

 

 “At first, I considered the film to be a veiled statement on pets, based on the opening scene and the boy’s attempts to pull away from his confinement. Then my perspective shifted abruptly, and I was immediately convinced the central motif was about the stigmatization of mental illness (such as dementia). This idea is made even stronger due to how the characters behave towards the titular teen.

 

“…a boy who continually attempts to escape his parents…He also tries to avoid his neighbors…”

 

    However, after the brief 13-minute film had reached its halfway point, all of my preconceptions had gone out the window. It felt like I was watching a hybrid of Hereditary and the “Eye of the Beholder” episode of The Twilight Zone. Although that does not capture the full essence of the story either.”

 

    Yet, even with his “further information,” he seems to entirely miss the point of a narrative not that very complex. But we are in an age of literalness. Reading beyond the frame or in literature beyond the page is becoming increasingly difficult.

   This story begins with “our boy” being trussed up by rope to a post, as he desperately attempts to jump up and escape his bondage. Finally, after several jumps when he realizes it is truly impossible, watched as he is by his harridan mother, he sits, picks up an apple and tosses it in the air, the symbol of man’s first sin, the fruit that would result in his expulsion from his Eden.

    Still fondling the apple, so to speak, he is finally brought indoors by his parents and grandparents, all riding their canes, his dirty feet and legs being measured for the next step in his life.

   While his mother dials up others to attend to what he might describe as his maturation party, we observe his father gathering up all the apples and fruits of the young’s man childhood experience, what we might describe as the fruits of his young life. They are clearly representative of a slightly forbidden past in which he will no longer be permitted to participate. His innocence has been declared to be ended by his adult authorities. Even the apple in hand is stolen from him.

     The plastic bag of fruits is carried away by his cane-ridden grandmother, as we hear his own mother continue her calls to the neighbors, inviting them to the maturation ceremony. In a truly stunning visual scene, his father closes the blinds at the very moment that his mother hangs up the phone. We now await the symbolical teen circumcision.

      But this is not such a ceremony we realize but something even more horrific. Doors are closed as the boy sits now in dark, his parents awaiting the delivery a what appears almost as a miniature coffin containing the tools to accomplish his crippling.*

      The boy now observes his family and neighbors entering the house in a kind of parade of wheel-chair bound, walker-assisted, and cane carrying zombies like something out of The Night of the Living Dead, not figures, however, risen from the dead but deadened by their own parent’s teachings and limited visions of their lives.

       The boy witnesses it all, his eyes large with terror, realizing that they are planning something evil with regard to him. His youth is already over, and he knows if he is to survive he must now escape, but how? His attempts to leap up to the window from which he might find some way out are meaningless; he is too small, too frail, just as he has been unable to break through the ropes of his previous tetherment. The cane-wielding father climbs up the staircase to bring him into the community.

      As I mention earlier, as the boy is bathed, his mother cries over the seemingly necessary transformation, the boy feeling all the horror the scene suggests. Why is he being bathed, why is she crying, what is happening in his life? His mother is taken away, the patriarchs have gathered, the doors are closed.

     In an absolutely glorious grotesque scene almost worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, the ghouls of his ancestors and neighbors gather round the table on which, in an ill-fitted suit, the boy is laid out, his eyes bound, a rope twisted round his mid-riff, as a ball-peen hammer prepares to crash into his knee-cap. The frame turns black.

      The sound score hints at a battle royale, a fight between the elders and the youth. We can hear a door opening, someone crashing through, and suddenly get a view of the elders looking out the windows to see the young boy, still blind-folded, crawling across the lawn.

      Finally, as the elders slowly move out trying to recapture him, he stands, pulls off the blindfold and leaps into the air twice, apparently after the moon we soon see at the last image, after he has run off, escaping the “normality” of their world.

      What doesn’t get said about this film is that also reads as a gay film, the fruit that they attempt to take away from him not only being the so-called fruit of their loins, the fruits of his innocent youth, but the very identity of this boy as “a fruit,” a gay boy who will not properly conform to their society. This boy has definitely eaten of a forbidden fruit, or at least imagined it.

      The remarkable score, “Crossings” by composer Alvin Lucier, effectively creates a sense of the increasing horror and necessary escape by our young hero.

 

*I use the word “crippling” here, because the adults of the tale are not merely “disabling” the boy but literally breaking his bones, crippling him forever from being able again to walk without a cane. This is not a tale about a disabled person, but about a young man intentionally transformed from an able being into a shuffling, slow-walking human being. It is not a story about nature but about an intentional act of forcing him be unable to forcible and freely walk ever again in his life.

 

Los Angeles, April 29, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).