Beach Rats (2017)

Eliza Hittman's Beach Rats arrives with its cards held close to the chest, which is the correct posture for a film about a young man who cannot say what he wants. Frankie, nineteen and adrift on the edges of Brooklyn, spends his evenings on a webcam site for older men, tilting his hat to hide his eyes from strangers and from himself. The closeted bisexuality here is not a subplot or a garnish. It is the whole architecture of the thing: the motel rooms, the anonymous hookups, the girlfriend he cannot perform for, the pills he takes to blur the distance between who he is with his friends and who he is alone. This is a film saturated in same-sex desire and the shame that trails it, and it earns every point of that designation.

What it declines to be is a pamphlet. There is no racial reckoning in its all-white beach-town milieu, no climate anxiety, no indictment of late capitalism, no celebration of bodies in any of the approved registers, no neurodivergent interiority, no historical revisionism. Hittman is a woman directing a study of male fragility and the theater of masculinity, but she is not building an argument about gender so much as observing its casualties. The shirtless selfies are documentation, not advocacy.

And the film refuses to lecture. It tells its story through atmosphere, through the 16 mm grain and Harris Dickinson's laconic blankness, trusting us to assemble the meaning. That reticence has drawn criticism, some of it fair, about who gets to tell this story and what the violence at the end is for. The film does not answer. It just watches Frankie watch the fireworks, and then it stops.