Rhys Marc Jones | Boundaries / 2018

cornered into self-destruction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rhys Marc Jones (screenwriter and director) Boundaries / 2018 [9 minutes]

 

In this short film, Welsh-Irish director Rhys Marc Jones focuses on a young black man, Jared (Jared Free) has evidently been dumped by his former boyfriend, primarily for his desperate need to be loved. Even if one loved Jared, apparently, he is so desperately seeking attention at times that he violates, again and again, his own body.

     As we first encounter him we see him with razor blade in hand, and notice the long scars of cuts of his legs where, apparently, he has cut himself several times. This morning he simply bashes his head into the wall of the shower, causing a deep wound.

     Visiting his former boyfriend Paix (Paix Robinson), he is granted entry only so that Paix might tend to the head wound, which Jared claims was the result of intruders who seemed to want to do him harm, but were only after his phone.

    Paix reluctantly mends the wound and shares some drugs with him, in the process being swept up again, just for a moment, with love for this obviously dependent young man. But as he begins to undress him, he finds the phone still in his pants pocket, and again reminded of the several leg cuts, puts back on his clothes and simply demands Jared leave.

     Clearly he has had to much of this young man’s drama, his desperate need for constant attention and caring.

     In the next few scenes with see Jared on the subway, spotting a good-looking girl. He quickly pulls off the bandage over his head-would and moves into the next car where she sits, sitting beside her as she offers him up a tissue for the blood of the wound. She looks at him sympathetically as he obviously tells her yet another story of how he came to be attacked, calling upon himself, at least, a temporary kind of attention and sympathy, perhaps even what he can imagine is love.

     This is a terrible wounded human being, but not from the outside, from the attacks of others, but from within, by his deep, deep insecurities which are the very thing which finally make people pull away from him, leaving him always standing alone in the corner self-destruction.

     Whenever he might become strong enough to pay attention to the concerns of others, instead of himself, he may truly find love; until then he is frozen out of the very thing his fragile ego most demands.

     It is not that this figure has gone beyond the “boundaries” of love as much as that he has never entered into a true relationship, focused as he is, always, on his own constant sense of need.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).