Matias Breuer | Stink / 2024

scent of a man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Drew Beckman (screenplay), Matias Breuer (director) Stink / 2024 [11 minutes]

 

Obviously suffering from hyperosmia, the central figure of this film, called simply “The Creep” in the credits (played by writer Drew Beckman) is a gay man who literally stalks the men whose body odors and even their spit and urine draw him to them. Of course, in this case, is does help that both of the men to whom he slavishly attracted to are also handsome straight studs.

     It begins with his narrative about the attractive Levi (Karan Menon), whose looks, sweat, and finally even a piece of his spit left on the sands of Venice get “The Creep” so excited that he cannot resist from entering the man’s apartment while he showers. Once inside he almost suffocates in the sucking in the smells of the victim’s shoes before he actually enters the bathroom where Levi is showering, quickly dropping his own shorts and putting on those of his idol before taking up the man’s toothbrush, sucking it thoroughly in his own mouth before he dips it in the man’s urine in the toilet, swallows the juices and puts it back in the vessel from which he has extracted it.

     As he lays down in his victim’s bed with his head embedded in a pair of the man’s shorts, there is a knock at the door. It’s Levi’s friend Chadwick (Albert Muzquiz), another chiseled, hirsute man come to pick up his friend to whisk him off to a straight bar where they will hang with some “chicks.”

      As unfaithful to the smells that intrigue him as many a gay man who picks up a new man every night, we see him in the last scene, sitting on a green lusting over the smells of Chadwick’s shoes and socks. When Chadwick suddenly asks him to look after his things while he heads to the bathroom, The Creep quickly grabs his socks as runs off with them, clearly ready to fall into a near-orgasmic rapture.

     This film details an aspect of gay life I might never before imagined, but I am not sure I needed to know about. Yet, in gay movie after gay movie, we do see men, attracted to another, picking up their underpants to take in a good whiff, and finding it utterly pleasant to sit around a locker sucking up the smell of their sweat. It’s obviously far more common than most of us might imagine. Gay men obviously like the smell of other men, just like straight men like the smell of women (just ask Al Pacino in his 1992 sexist film directed by Martin Brest, Scent of a Woman).

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).