Like Cattle Towards Glow (2015)

Like Cattle Towards Glow: Directed by Dennis Cooper, Zac Farley. With Nicolas Hau, Gabriel Norman, E.D. Yang, Joris Monnier. Several short films about troubled gay youngsters who attempt to resolve their psychological issues through bizarre fetish play or sinister self expression.

“Zac Farley and Dennis Cooper have brought together a compendium of stories loosely connected by fetishist themes. The first one is probably the only one meritorious of any real comment. A young man likes to have sex with another as if he were a corpse – or, certainly inanimate during the experience, anyway. Then we see a modern-day poet, I guess, on a stage. Half way through his nightclub performance, two other men proceed to sexually assault him – for real or part of the act? Thirdly, two guys meet at a tram stop and one offers his ass to the other in return for some heroin; the fourth and fifth stories are really too bizarre and shallow to go into. As individual films, perhaps the first two might stand on their own – the effort from Nicolas Hau is effective, but otherwise the whole thing is just too miserable. It seeks to use sex as the commodity facilitating and perpetuating their difficulties and though striking at times, the narrative as a whole just serves to reinforce their gloomy existences with little for the audience to benefit from either practically or aesthetically. Itu0026#39;s brutal and violent, but not in any purposeful or creative way, indeed the last two films would challenge even the most adept of critics to see the point… Thereu0026#39;s got to be more to life?”