Strange Creatures

Strange Creatures arrives wearing the respectable clothes of a road trip dramedy in the tradition of Nebraska and Little Miss Sunshine, and it largely succeeds on those terms. Director Henry Boffin, making his feature debut, deposits two estranged brothers into a car with their mother's ashes and points them at the Australian horizon. The conflict that separated them involves the pansexuality of one brother and the apparent inability of the other to process it with any grace. This is, by the standards of contemporary indie cinema, a fairly standard ignition mechanism.

The film's most notable progressive credential is its foregrounding of pansexuality as a specific identity rather than a generic stand-in for queerness, which is either a meaningful distinction or the sort of precision that film festival programmers find deeply satisfying. Both are probably true. The film screened at Queer Screen Film Fest, which tells you where it lives culturally. Nate's boyfriend being a funeral director while the brothers are transporting a corpse is either a layered joke or a coincidence, and the film seems content to let you decide. The masculine emotional dysfunction of brother Ged is treated as a condition to be examined and, eventually, partially remedied, which gives the film a faint corrective posture without tipping into full sermonizing.

What keeps Strange Creatures from a higher score is its apparent commitment to being a film about people rather than a film about positions. The humor is described as dry and Australian, which is to say it does not stop to explain itself or ask for credit. The reconciliation arc is earned through accumulating absurdity rather than through speeches. It is, in the end, a modestly progressive film that wears its values the way most Australians wear sunscreen: applied without fanfare, because the alternative is a burn.