Rebecca Emcken | Cognitio / 2018

the invisible confidant

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rebecca Emcken (screenwriter and director) Cognitio / 2018 [20 minutes]

 

I don’t think I have to remind the readers of My Queer Cinema that in these essays I reveal all aspects of the plot in my larger discussion of the film. But the power of Danish director Rebecca Emcken’s short film Cognitio lies in its ability to convince the viewer that the hallucination of a young man, Tobias, locked away in a psychiatric hospital is real.

    We don’t precisely know why Tobias (Lasse Steen) has been sent away to the hospital, but by film’s end we recognize that it obviously has something to do with his great sense of guilt for having homosexual feelings, his mental solution being to create a beautiful friend of his own age, Emil (Lior Cohen) as a potential sexual playmate. In Tobias’ tortured mind, Emil appears to be straight, but presents all the benefits of a sexually interested friend who permits Tobias to fantasize about a possible sexual relationship without the dangers of having to face the hostility or hate of a real person.   

     Such an imaginary friend has other benefits as well. He praises Tobias’ art. He even encourages the boy to masturbate, something apparently Tobias has been too guilty to do since he was 15, but now engages in, imaging a sexual encounter with his new friend. Egil even serves as the agent for Tobias’ break-in to a drug cabinet for Ritalin and other pills that helps him to get high. But even an imaginary friend can appear, at times, to be as controlling as a father (the word which at one point Tobias’ applies to Egil), freezing him out of other friendships he might have had with real fellow patients such as Frederick (Mikkel Rishøj), and finally, betraying him just as apparently other real friends have in Tobias’ past.

    Naturally, in a quiet voice of a psychiatrist, the doctor suggests that they provide him with medication to help alleviate his hallucinations. 

 But director Emcken, helped through Clara Kokseby’s intense musical score as well as her cinematography, so convinces most viewers of Emil’s actual existence that numerous of the commentators on YouTube site and elsewhere are totally convinced—at least in their first time in watching the film—that it is the hospital doctors who are refusing to believe Emil’s “real” guilt, convinced of the relationship between the two boys, as if it is the fantasy figure who had successfully succeeded in forcing the doctors to doubt Tobias’ sanity.

     We live in an age when scientific truths are regularly brought up for severe questioning, and when the real function of medical institutions such as psychiatric wards are openly challenged—although surely this began long before with the horrific visions of psychiatric wards and hospitals as early The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Snake Pit (1948), Harvey (1950), Suddenly Last Summer (1959), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and numerous others.

    But a second viewing of this film makes it clear that early on in this 20-minute work, when the doctor asks about his patient’s interaction with his fellow patients and suggests that Tobias try harder to befriend others, that she would obviously have noted if indeed Tobias had made friends if Egil were a real being. And it’s quite clear that Tobias’ own mini-rebellion against Egil, as he temporary befriends the soccer-playing Frederick, is a momentary attempt to cure himself by escaping his fantasy friend for one of the other patients. A second viewing forces us to realize why, when Tobias insists that it was Egil who really stole the drugs, the nurses don’t even bother to question the boy laying on the same bed, or at least to suspect that the two might have gone in on the raid together? There is no other. Certainly, skeptical viewers are clued in to the truth when, as Tobias and Frederick sit talking and Tobias suddenly turns to talk to Egil, Frederick calmly gets up and walks away, clearly realizing that he cannot communicate at the moment with someone who has an imaginary other to whom he speaks.

     Despite the film’s clever ability to delude many of its viewers, it also provides them with evidence of the truth.

   What did trouble me, however, about the doctors is why they didn’t probe the boy about his fear of sexual contact or recognize that his created friend is someone he imagines as a possibly gay buddy. What have his parents done to him to make him so terrified of gay sexual activity? Did he get bullied, beaten by other boys he approached when he was young? Most of the observers commenting on this film had approached it as a possible LBGTQ story, but afterwards felt somewhat disappointed and confused by Tobias’ sexual identity. But the film makes Tobias’ desires quite apparent. So why don’t the doctors query him about it or at least pursue the causes of his hallucination? It is a gay love story, but without the immediate possibility of Tobias finding the other with whom he might fall in love. And it appears that institutional science will not be an agent in helping him to find or even realize that there are others like himself. They rid him of his hallucinations but surely will not resolve the cause.

 

Los Angeles, February 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).

 

Emma Fine | Sinnerman / 2023

the subject was blow-jobs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Josh Rose (screenplay), Emma Fine (director) Sinnerman / 2023 [8 minutes]

 

The standard blurb for this British short film, whether written by someone involved with the film or an IMDb reviewer, comes close to being an outright lie, and if nothing else is misleading:

 

“Sinnerman is a coming-of-age drama centered around two young Jewish men who face the tough decision of whether to embrace their secret relationship and leave their community, or end their relationship and marry the girls that their parents have chosen for them.”

 

    Both of these young men seem a bit beyond the age of “coming,” and neither Rafi (Andrew Houghton) or Mark (Reece Evans) are really discussing the issue of whether or not they might actually run away together as a gay couple. Yes, there is evidently at least one girl down stairs (perhaps there are two) waiting to get to know her future husband. But despite their two year of regular sexual encounters, Mark, a cruel and glib, young man who clearly will grow into a being that can justify anything to himself, has no intentions whatsoever about describing anything he has had with Rafi the years as constituting a gay relationship.

    As Mark tells Rafi, it was all simply a bit of fun. Even though he was the one who first enticed Rafi with a kiss, he has evidently controlled their encounters with rules all along: no kissing, no shirt, etc. as if that would determine that the blow jobs Rafi were giving him had nothing to do with being a homosexual. He is evidently quite determined to get married, raise a family, and lie to his wife when he sneaks out at night or weekends for a bit of same-sex “fun.”

     Meanwhile, Rafi has become completely obsessed with Mark, has apparently fallen in love with him and shared all the things he could never tell anyone else in the closed Orthodox or Conservative Jewish world into which he was born. Rafi is not at all ready to get married, and is apparently unable to lie to himself that everything will be just fine.

     Yet, in being gay, he sees himself as afflicted, truly queer, almost maimed, and has depended on Mark to share his love enough to help him find a way out.

     Both boys are coward, unable even be strong enough to imagine breaking away from their own family to save themselves from spending miserable lives in the pretense of marriage, and passing that misery onto their children and wives.

     There is no real discussion here. Mark just describes Rafi’s confusion as an obsession he developed with which he played no part.

      Frankly these characters, particularly Mark, are so despicable that I can find no sympathy for them or their situation. By this age they should have already been off at university, and refused arranged marriages, and made up their minds about their sexuality. At least Rafi realizes he is gay; while Mark prefers a self-delusion which he will probably act out the rest of his life. But Rafi is so weak that he will perhaps have to create his own excuses for destroying the lives of his family as well.

     In any event, according to Mark there is not “secret relationship,” just a couple of boys filling their sexual needs. And neither of them are doing anything to “face…tough decisions.”

      What we witness in this short play is another moment in their cowardice, and the beginning of lives of lies and familial suffering. Why should anyone what to produce such a film in this day and age. If religion can create this, the film has at least responsibility to openly say so instead making it appear as if it’s just another force pulling at these poor, unfortunate babes. This is not a film about gay love, but cock-sucking and the discovery, in Rafi’s case, that you really like it. Waiting to years just to get another kiss is not my idea of a relationship, sexual or otherwise.

     The title seems to say it all. This is still a world were gay sex is a sin. Frankly, I no longer give a damn.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).