Raindance Film Festival review – Dirty Boy (2024)
An assured feature debut from writer-director Doug Rao, this comes at a set of contemporary problems – caused by a literally unholy tie-up between billionare entitlement and doomsday cult christofasism – obliquely to great effect. Away from the modern world, presumably in the wilds of North America but shot in picturesque Austria, patriarch Walter Wentworth and his enabling wife/minister Verity (Susie Porter) rule over their flock – supposed orphans who submit to ritual mating (with animal masks) in the hope of increasing the tribe, with girls and boys warned against an outside culture steeped in pornography and sin though the younger women are expected to ‘service’ Wentworth sexually and it’s strongly hinted that literal bodies are buried on the property.
Isaac (Stan Steinbichler) is the most troubled of the flock, haunted by an imaginary alter ego called Frankie (or maybe Yankee Dragon, or maybe Janke Dragan) who breathes fire and urges him to depravities. Are the sludgy smoothies and heavy medication controlling his condition or exacerbating it? Misfit Isaac and slightly dissatisfied Hope (Honor Gillies) team up to dig deeper into the set-up, which means rooting through a convenient stash of clues and making connections between the flock and a sinister political candidate (Marek Lichtenberg). McTavish is calmly domineering as the self-satisfied mad messiah, and even Isaac isn’t quite sure whether he’s a true believer or simply rich enough to found a cult which happens to indulge his every whim and give him carefully-brainwashed minions to push around.
A few hints – like nicely-designed multi-purpose pod gadgets – suggest that this might be set in the near future, or else Wentworth has access to tech he’s not shared with the world. It’s not Rao’s fault that underplaying his axis of evil in a film made last year has been trumped by the far more cartoonish behaviour of realworld big money big bads. It’s a slow-burning, artfully designed mystery given bite by Steinbichler’s arguments with his other self – dotted with dirty jokes – but builds up to a last-reel orgy of blood-boltered revenge.
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