By Daniel Crooke
Give or take a big, broad Black Mass or two, Aussie toughie Joel Edgerton has proven himself to be a craftsman of restraint throughout his most recent crop of work, and continues to surprise audiences by subverting their expectations of how a man of his hulking size and stature should emote on the big screen. His performance in last year’s criminally undervalued Loving buries deep currents of sensitivity beneath the protective creases of his brooding face, and he manages to say more and speak louder through the locked intensity of his body language than the volume of his voice in Trey Edward Shults’s apocalyptic downer It Comes At Night.
However, his most compelling work as an artist to date has been behind the camera...
He so finely turne tdhe screws on his elegant, sophisticated thriller The Gift that he ended up creating one of Hollywood’s more striking directorial debuts in recent memory. This week brings news that his follow-up feature as a writer-director, Boy Erased, has been acquired by Focus Features for worldwide distribution. This is cause for celebration...
Demonstrating a canny ability for evocative camera movement that irritates the psychological safety of his characters – as well as keeping a tight grip on what to show and what to hide in the frame, keeping his audience guessing which uncertain destination its edges will linger towards next – Edgerton surprised critics and moviegoers alike with his mastery of the formal elements of genre, and how they elevated the fairly pulpy roots of The Gifts’s psycho-stalker premise.
Boy Erased, however, is decidedly anything but straightforward genre fare - although the plot details seemingly provide ample opportunities for Edgerton's freshly honed skills to come in handy. Starring Oscar nominee Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea) as the closeted son of a conservative Baptist preacher, who finds himself outed to his small town and forced to attend a gay conversion therapy program, Boy Erased will hopefully find Edgerton flexing those sharp, nimble muscles to burrow into the personal horror of its lead character, psychologically and environmentally. Additionally the film will co-star Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, as well as Edgerton himself playing a therapist. With production set to begin this fall, fans of this exciting up-and-coming director have a new feature to look forward to in 2018.
[Editor's Note: the author of the source material, Garrard Conley, has recently addressed concerns from fans that the movie will be "straight-washed" given that the cast and writer/director are, to common knowledge, straight. He assures the LGBT community that he has been heavily consulted and involved with drafts of the screenplay and that it will be sensitively and authentically handled.]