Castration Movie: Pt. 1 (2025) should be required viewing for anyone who claims to be human these days. The first completed part of actor, writer, and director Louise Weard’s intended series is a four-and-a-half hour, lo-fi epic that asserts its existence at a time when conservatives and archconservative lawmakers are working to erase trans rights and trans lives. Weard’s film is intimate, funny, heartbreaking, and ruthlessly frank, but also a sweet document of the very lives that are under threat. It without a doubt offers important and unflinching insight into the world of trans individuals, but it's also an amazingly engaging feat of independent filmmaking that takes the ethos of Dogme films, Todd Verow’s early DV-movies, Queer German cinema, and many more to new and fertile places. Castration Movie: Pt. 1 holds the shimmering promise of what cinema can be now, when multiplex fare has entered its moribund final act and fascism is tightening its grip on dissent, free expression, and the rights of the vulnerable. Great films about real things made on the margins are evermore essential, and this is a great film.
Weard’s film is broken down into two chapters. The first, titled “Incel Superman,” follows Turner Stewart (Noah Baker), a young man who works as a production assistant. His relatively new relationship seems to be on shaky ground. His girlfriend, Brooklyn (Jasmine Provins), questions if he’s even attracted to her. The problems and sexual awkwardness of their relationship build and she breaks up with Turner, sending him off the rails and into a spiral of bad decisions. This first part is teeming with painfully uncomfortable conversations and situations that are shot with grimy directness. While the aesthetic is muddy and consumer-grade, Weard’s actors don’t offer backyard B-movie performances. Instead, their performances are achingly real ones. In front of her exceedingly well-placed camera, the thoughtful and precise beats of this first narrative evince a level of control that quickly coalesces visual chaos into something stunning: a punk movie in the hands of a skilled dramatist.
The next chapter, “Trap Swan Princess,” presents a more diffuse and expansive narrative. Traps (Louise Weard) is a trans sex worker who is the center of her social circle. She turns tricks for money and drugs, goes to her friends’ shows, and bullshits with them around the kitchen table while drinking and doing poppers. Despite this debauchery, they are a lovable and innocent group of young, mostly trans people. Traps is handling her transition the DIY-way, buying her hormones from a dealer (played by Vera Drew). She also thinks there might be a romantic future with one of her clients. Her friend Adeline (Aoife Josie Clements) is struggling with her own transition, feeling like she’s being bullied at work and afraid she won’t be able to support herself and her boyfriend after his gender-affirming surgery. Traps is trying to be strong for herself and her friend, but things start to fall apart.
There’s a scene in Castration where our star gets pissed on, but, like the rest of the film, this act is not presented just to shock. Before Traps’s friend pisses directly on her face to create new content for her OnlyFans, there’s a brief discussion of whether the phone camera should be upright or in landscape position. Then, right before the urine flow, Traps makes sure to ask if the phone is rolling. It’s a scene of both affirmation and degradation, friendship and exploitation. It’s exactly the kind of scene that makes the entire film so beautiful. Everything Weard shows us cuts so close to the real that the difference between reality and fiction often becomes indistinguishable, like when Rocco (Magda Baker) shows his friends his breasts at the kitchen table before his long-awaited surgery to have them removed. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes we are there for the moment Rocco’s bandages are removed at the doctor’s office. We see the fresh stitches from the mastectomy. It’s graphic and unquestionably real, but so is Rocco’s excitement and joy.
Castration Movie: Pt. I screens on Monday, June 23, at the New Parkway as part of Frameline 49.
