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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
