In the opening shot of the third installment of Louise Weard’s Castration Movie series, we see the shocking aftermath of a violent event. It’s intense and immediately gripping, but what we hear is striking in a different way: the pop and crinkle of hands on a camcorder. Once again, Weard is painting a complex picture with a lo-fi brush, using the idiomatic candor of the home movie image to construct a highly charged simulacrum of our current political, social, and sexual reality, and of trans people’s place in it.
Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage (2026) continues the cringey, sometimes hilarious, sometimes gutting, discomfort we’ve come to expect from the series. At the center of this chapter is filmmaker/actor Avalon Fast, reprising her role as Izzy from Castration Movie Anthology i. In a 20-minute take very early in the film, she fields a phone call at her job as a helpline operator. The caller is struggling with the loss of a loved one in a violent attack. Izzy has a strange personal connection to the incident: the perpetrator was her friend Turner. She gently sympathizes with the voice on the other end of the line, but when the call is over, we see another side of her, one that aggressively demands traditional masculinity from her broke, slacker partner Trent (Henri Gillespi).
Fast’s acting is impressively naturalistic, bringing a rawness to her character who is at times emotionally exhausted, at times cruel. As Izzy, she mocks Trent’s “faggy” hand placement and calls them a little bitch during sex. It’s not terribly surprising she isn’t happy to learn that Trent is Tiffany, a trans woman. What follows is the slow-motion disintegration of their relationship—a saga of struggle and bickering that ends with Izzy’s rejection of Tiffany. This singular focus on the end of a relationship renders chapter iii the most European of Weard’s series. While the director cites Mumblecore and Dogme 95 as primary influences, it’s also something like camcorder Bergman, Ozon, or Denis, repurposing these directors' brutal dissections of love to address hyper-contemporary ideas and attitudes.
On the lighter side, Michaela “Traps” Sinclair is back, with Weard reprising her iconic role from the first film. She’s more grounded now, adulting in glasses and a simple black turtleneck. She’s taken on a leadership role in a trans support group, but her hard realism about survival in society for trans people is making waves. Michaela draws fire for critiquing the fashion choices of her trans sisters, telling them, “Go online and look at American Eagle ads to see how people your age are dressing.” It’s very funny, but also reflects conflicting views on the terms of acceptance trans people are forced to navigate. In this way, Weard continues to dramatize the spirit of the moment without being a final word on it. Castration Movie Part iii is a big, painful, messy conversation executed with brilliant precision once again.
Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage screens this Saturday, June 20, at the New Parkway as part of “Frameline50.”
