‘Blue Film’ review: UK rising star Kieron Moore impresses in provocative, uneven US debut

Dir/scr. Elliot Tuttle. US. 2025. 85mins.

Los Angeles-based queer camboy Aaron Eagle (UK actor Kieron Moore) makes a living by teasing, goading and humiliating his followers until they fill his virtual tip jar in the hope of seeing everything. But when one mysterious fan offers him $50,000 for a single night together, Aaron cannot resist the lure of easy money. There is a catch however. The punter (Reed Birney) is revealed to be a figure from Aaron’s distant past, and both find themselves revisiting uncomfortable territory. Elliot Tuttle’s debut feature Blue Film is a confrontational but uneven double-hander that deals with power plays and perversions. It loses its way increasingly in the second half, but delivers handsomely as a showcase for Moore’s magnetic screen presence.

Lacks the confidence and clarity to say anything particularly significant or new

Moore (Vampire Academy, Code Of Silence) serves up snotty, swaggering star quality in spades. He has the look, at times, of a young Marlon Brando, with the same brawling sensuality and bruised vulnerability. His charisma more or less carries a picture that gets rather bogged down in its in-your-face transgressiveness. This is an undeniably fearless debut from Tuttle, whose previous work includes the East Berlin-set podcast series Lina’s Song, venturing into the thorny thematic realms of paedophilia, extreme S&M and religious faith. But Blue Film lacks the confidence and clarity to say anything particularly significant or new. It could generate interest at LGBTQ+ themed events, following a world premiere in competition at Edinburgh International Film Festival.

The film unfolds predominantly in the aggressively neutral rented apartment that Birney’s character, Hank, has hired for a single night. It is a banal backdrop, lit rather flatly, but the lack of atmosphere in the sparsely furnished rooms serves to focus attention on the tensions between Aaron and the man who has hired him. When we, and Aaron – who has the word ‘Diablo’ tattooed about his right eyebrow and myriad others across his torso – first meet Hank, the older man has concealed his face behind a knitted balaclava. Hank points his camcorder and starts to probe beneath Aaron’s assured posture with a series of increasingly personal questions.

Aaron enjoys being looked at and has no problem being filmed (the picture’s secondary location is found in the tight frames of the numerous devices that have trained their lenses on Aaron over the years). But he also likes to be in control of his own narrative, and it soon becomes clear Hank knows that he’s lying about a childhood in Miami. Hank also knows Aaron’s real name is Alex.

Birney’s role is the trickier of the two. His neediness makes him unattractive even before the film reveals his true nature. A former middle school teacher, he knew Aaron as a child and, he says, worshipped him from afar, before being dismissed from his job, disgraced and sentenced to a stint in prison for an attempted assault on another boy. The conversation between Aaron and Hank is combative, with both pushing the other to reveal their secrets and, in the case of Hank, to reconcile his tendencies with a newfound religious faith.

Their mutual candour takes in personal details that may prove disquieting for some viewers; likewise their eventual, deeply uncomfortable sexual encounter. But the main problem is that, for all its boundary-smashing shock value, much of Blue Film is overly talky and quite dull.