This article contains spoilers about the plot of Blue Film, and contains frank discussion of pedophilia.
Reed Birney is expecting walkouts. The Tony winner, known for his celebrated stage work in The Humans and Casa Valentina as well as recurring roles on House of Cards and American Horror Story, coleads Blue Film, a radical queer drama that was filmed well over a year ago and is finally set for its premiere on Saturday at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. In the movie, Birney plays a part that some—honestly, most—actors of his caliber would consider unfathomably risky. When he read the script, he was “flabbergasted.” But he Zooms before me a proud, if anxious, man, ready for the world to see why he took the leap. “When making the movie was over, I thought, ‘This might’ve been the movie role I’ve waited my whole life to play.’”
Blue Film comes from writer-director Elliot Tuttle, making his feature debut. Tuttle wrote the script while journaling about adolescent sexuality, specifically his private unpacking of a fantasy from when he was in middle school: “I really wanted my history teacher to have sex with me,” he says. Tuttle started writing a movie set in one location, focused on two characters, and propelled by the transgressive. The filmmaker describes initial drafts as a “manifesto” unfurling his many thoughts about sex. Then it became a character drama—then, a kind of psychological thriller rooted in the taboo.
We first meet Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore), a gay fetish camboy, in the midst of a seductive livestream. He’s hired by an anonymous older man to spend the night at his home—presumably, a straightforward exchange of money for company and sex—only to quickly glean an ulterior motive. The man, played by Birney, interviews Aaron on camera while wearing a ski mask, asking him oddly personal and intimate questions. He seems genuinely curious; Aaron turns deeply uncomfortable. Eventually, Aaron confronts the stranger, removes the mask, and gasps in recognition. “Mr. Grey,” he says quietly. It’s Hank Grey, his old middle school teacher—the one who was fired for the attempted sexual assault of a 12-year-old student.
“This felt like the logical end point of these fantasies I had as an adolescent, about teachers I fantasized about,” Tuttle tells me. Blue Film then dramatizes a long, complicated conversation between Aaron and Hank that meditates on deviant sexuality and confronts the darkest corners of human desire. Hank admits he was attracted to Aaron when Aaron was a minor. As for why he has brought his old student back into his life, more than a decade later, he says, “I want to know if I still love you.” Eventually, we watch them explore being physically intimate together.
Blue Film is absorbing, brilliantly acted, intently hard to stomach, and ethically discomfiting. The movie presents a pedophile as a protagonist while aiming for a certain level of mainstream awareness, requiring its audience to listen to his perspective and grapple with it in good faith. It’s a shocking work of American independent cinema in 2025, considering its subject matter—a topic that’s especially radioactive amid the swirling Epstein files saga. Its insistence on pushing boundaries is completely at odds with an industry terrified of controversy and scrambling to simply stay afloat.
The filmmakers argue that this, actually, is why Blue Film is well-timed—and worthy of consideration. “Trump is ushering in this cultural conservatism that I think forces the queer community and gay tastemakers to really present one view of queerness that is kind of immune to critique…and, to me, pretty boring and not in the tradition of being a queer artist,” Tuttle says. “I’m resentful of what is happening to queer storytellers right now…. People are hungry for something that is not so limited by what’s tasteful.”
“If you feel any sort of feeling towards Hank, it’s because you’ve done something beautiful. You’ve listened to someone that you’ve been told you shouldn’t listen to,” Moore adds. “We don’t humanize him and forgive him. We just speak to his character like he’s a human being, which he is.”
Mark Duplass first met Tuttle as “a high school film fanatic from a small town in Maine.” The indie icon and Blue Film consulting producer has been mentoring the director ever since, for about a decade now. “I’d never met anyone so fully obsessed with the art and craft of independent film,” Duplass tells me via email. “He reminded me a lot of Sean Baker when I met him before we made Tangerine together.” Even so, when Duplass received the script for Blue Film? “It scared the hell out of me.”
Blue Film is produced by Bijan Kazerooni, Will Youmans, Adam Kersh, and Waylon Sall, and was shot on a budget of next to nothing over two intensive weeks. Industry stalwarts like Duplass and Birney lend gravitas to a project that would otherwise be pigeonholed as fringe—and already has been in certain corners. “I felt I was with somebody who had done his homework, and who was smart, and knew what he wanted to do…. He believes that American films are a little coy about sex,” Birney says of Tuttle. “I was not thinking about, ‘Is this a good career move? How’s this going to land?’ I was so happy to do the work.”
Tuttle came of age as a devout fan of European auteurs like Catherine Breillat and Lars von Trier—filmmakers who “are not afraid of what they’re doing, of the truths that they’re trying to represent on screen.” It’s less of a tradition in American movies. Still, Tuttle points out everything from the New Queer Cinema movement to David Lynch’s Eraserhead as examples of an alt-national legacy of courting controversy, and penetrating the zeitgeist, through truly provocative filmmaking.
Tuttle listened to personal stories in crafting the character of Hank, preferring first-person testimony to columns of statistics. “That was majorly helpful to me in at least getting some anecdotal evidence as to the variety of reasons someone might be a pedophile,” he says. The primary guiding light for him and Birney was the Sundance-award-winning 2014 documentary Pervert Park, set in the Palace Mobile Park of St. Petersburg, Florida, where more than 100 convicted sex offenders lived at the time of filming. “These people are in a lot of pain—they did not choose to be this way, and they are really, really struggling to make sense of their lives,” Birney says. “I thought, That’s a story that’s worth being told.”
We learn a great deal about Hank through his conversation with Aaron. Birney plays him with a sharp sense of humor, which both feels honest and makes Blue Film that much more squirmy. Hank also feels a profound amount of shame. The actor came in with concerns about the characterization; he wanted the film to make clear that Hank has never acted on his inclinations. Hank’s firing was for “attempted” assault, but he ultimately let the child go. A line that was cut from the final edit, but remains key to Birney’s haunting performance, reveals that the man has barely had any sex in his life at all.
The actor argues Hank is not a predator, given the information we have in the film. Viewers may surely disagree. “He doesn’t have a computer full of kiddie porn; he’s not rounding up kids,” Birney says. “He knows who he is and he knows how dangerous who he is can be, and he has purposely avoided that.”
Blue Film is not intended as a broad statement on the pedophilic condition. Its discursive structure examines the extremes and mysteries of sexuality, particularly queer sexuality. Aaron himself speaks brashly, even violently of his encounters with clients and what they ask him to do. He and Hank trade stories and feelings that, in any other context, they’d likely take to the grave.
“Any material or text about taboo desire is inherently going to rub some people the wrong way, just by definition,” Tuttle says. “But I think, in so many ways, so many of us can relate to taboo desire.” This is where Tuttle’s vulnerability comes in. He wrote much of himself into Aaron, whom Moore movingly portrays as a lost kid in a hunk’s body. “He can leave at any moment, but he never does,” Moore says. “Why does he stay? He’s curious. He doesn’t know why he wants to stay…. I knew I could bring that to it. I want to understand more, even if it’s things that I’m told that I should be disgusted by.”
“I don’t want to do something that makes you feel nothing,” the actor continues. “I’d rather you hate me than feel nothing.”
For a while, it seemed Moore might not get his wish. When Blue Film was first announced in December, after production was completed, the expectation was that it’d premiere early in 2025, at a festival like Sundance or SXSW. Despite Tuttle’s scrupulousness in keeping the movie sufficiently accessible—“I don’t want it to be NC-17; I want it to be able to find the audience that I’m trying to find”—the project faced rounds of rejection while looking for a launchpad.
“Generally, people were afraid of it, especially queer festivals,” Tuttle says. “I understand that a festival can’t really operate without its donors, but it also just feels a little weird to me that the mission feels like it’s strayed from the original intent of independent cinema…. It feels more corporatized and risk-averse.”
Edinburgh said yes, though, and is programming the movie alongside some of the year’s most acclaimed independent fare—including Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby—and panels led by major filmmakers like Nia DaCosta. Everyone involved with Blue Film conveys similar hopes for Saturday’s debut screening. “I hope it inspires long conversations over coffee afterwards,” Duplass says. “And maybe an argument.” Tuttle adds, “If anyone in good faith has a moral objection to the movie, that’s completely fine too…. I honestly think it’d probably be a pretty fun movie to have a strong opinion about, so I welcome it. I really do enjoy it.”
Birney is approaching the 50th anniversary of his feature-film debut, and in all that time, screen roles like this haven’t come around for him too often. He’s made strides of late, however, signing onto dangerous projects with a ton to say; he did devastating work alongside Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, and Ann Dowd in the 2021 school-shooter drama Mass. His career has arguably built toward this fraught moment.
For Moore, though, you have to wonder. Here’s a rising star from “a rough area of Manchester,” as he puts it—not yet 30, but already part of major projects like Peacock’s Vampire Academy and Apple TV+’s Masters of the Air. Blue Film’s very conceit will upset people. Its execution is bound to do the same. Starring in it is not without risk. “I’m going to walk away from it with my head held high, and I’m going to hopefully be working again. Yeah, let’s hope I won’t be blacklisted,” Moore says. “I think I’ll be okay. I might not work for a little bit.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
Zen and the Art of Being Jennifer Aniston
-
David Ellison Lays Out His Paramount Plans
-
Ghislaine Maxwell’s Lawyer: “I Love Representing the Underdog”
-
Inside the Celebrity Boat Trip That Was All Over Your Feeds
-
The Heartbreaking Love Story of Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson
-
The Real Problem With Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle Ad
-
You Can’t Kill Off James Marsden
-
Inside King Charles’s Lesser-Known Castle
-
The Demise of a Hamptons Dream
-
From the Archive: Dating Jeffrey Epstein
The post ‘Blue Film’ Is a Genuinely Shocking Queer Drama. Will Audiences Accept It? appeared first on Vanity Fair.
