Blue Film

Elliott Tuttle’s film seeks to unsettle, question, and, yes, provoke you. But his masterful two-hander wants, more than anything, to extend understanding to both men at the center, asking you to see them as flawed humans with depth and complexity, even if we’d rather not.

Blue Film provokes and captivates in equal measure, with the naked honesty of a black box off-off-Broadway play. It’s a two-hander chamber piece that doesn’t pull any punches in its dialogue or presentation.

Blue Film, through its many frank observations, stands as a vulnerable work about one’s past colliding with one’s present, in a bid to make peace with one’s true self.

The nexus of perversion, pain and sexual purpose driving writer-director Elliot Tuttle’s dark, discursive chamber drama is of a stripe rarely attempted in even the most self-consciously daring movies.

Blue Film is an unabashed provocation, but not a hollow one. Its dual protagonists — one a convicted pedophile, one a hyper-macho fetish camboy — don’t invite uncomplicated sympathy, so it’s just as well Tuttle is more interested in understanding them, exposing their respective damage in articulate detail, and letting the audience take things from there.

It may not always be easy to thoroughly enjoy a work like “Blue Film” because of its tough subject matter. Nobody wants to see an entirely sympathetic perspective of a person who has committed some of the most horrible deeds imaginable. But the strength of the film is not in seeking to answer those pure moral questions. It thrives in that gray area, contemplating the pain that leads people to the lives they end up creating for themselves.

By the end of Blue Film, it’s hard not to feel like it didn’t quite live up to its potential. As a novel, it would be engrossing. As a movie, it’s got good bones but a cowardly lack of boners.