Castration Movie Review

21 Mar 2025 - Alex

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
- 1 Corinthians 13:12

Here are ways in which a penis can be unhard in Castration Movie: idle, pissing, impotent, estrogenized, overcome with emotion. One man, a client of the film’s trans sex worker protagonist, asserts that he does not get hard—he cums soft.

The form of Louise Weard’s forthcoming feature debut, which screened at the Roxy this month, must be mentioned first: It is shot entirely on Weard’s childhood home video camera, producing a quality of image that feels both anachronistic and timeless, and it is four hours and thirty-five minutes long (with a ten-minute intermission).

Weard encouraged us to use the long runtime however we liked, as long as it wasn’t distracting—to take a nap, to grab dinner, to use the bathroom. She said it would become evident that there was no bad time for a pee break. In this regard, at least, any scene could be dispensable.

It did not feel that way viewing them. The handheld long takes penetrate with uncomfortable closeness. With an emphasis on bodies—especially hands—the cinematography is intimate, even intrusive. The camera looks too long and too closely for comfort.

There is also an awful absurdity to the heated conversations in the film (and this is a film with a lot of heated conversations). For the characters, each side’s diegetic logic scans, but, drawn out in duration and abstracted onto a screen, the arguments read as familiar and ridiculous at once.

In these scenes, Turner Stewart, the first chapter’s titular “Incel Superman,” acts impulsively, not entirely understanding why he has said the things he has until he has to find a reason after the fact. He behaves erratically, inconsiderately, violently, without even seeming to intend to. What he does do intentionally is justify the things he has said or done, despite not having had the justification in mind at the time. Any single one of his actions is entirely explicable in his emerging, self-reinforcing worldview. He then reaches in reflex for narratives offered to him by the incel imageboards he reads for entertainment. As he integrates these beliefs into his real life, he begins to believe them more genuinely and act them out more fervently.

Michaela “Traps” Sinclair of “Traps Swan Princess,” the film’s second chapter, mirrors Turner in her ability to justify everything she says and does to people. Unlike him, though, Traps reasons a priori, articulating toxic assertions based on an ideology she acquired online; Turner’s a posteriori justifications fit his experiences into the narratives he has been reading just as he begins to believe them. For Turner and Traps both, the ideas of online life and the relationships of offline life reflect and reinforce one another. And both of them escalate any disagreement into a conflict that allows them to deploy the messages they have internalized from the imageboards.

During the beginning of one fight, Turner carries an umbrella as his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Brooklyn walks beside him in the rain. He stomps the wet asphalt in rage, twisting his body uselessly, and soon we see that the umbrella has turned inside out, another useless appendage.

Weard curates a mild, relentless agony by refusing to move on from these scenes just as she holds the actionless shots. The discomfort builds, and she is reluctant to grant the viewer the mercy of the cut. We are made to look indignity in the face. Often, we see our own.

Traps and Turner interact with each other twice in the movie—once in real life, once online, both times anonymously and by chance. For all their parallels, they do not reflect one another well. They know how to engage best with themselves.

In a 4chan screenshot montage, we see a post made by Turner and a post made by Traps and countless posts made by strangers blur into one another. The acts of making and viewing meld together: Both engage with a shared space, perpetuating and participating in its culture. Watching this movie by a transgender person in a room of transgender people felt like we were partaking in the spirit of its creation. Recognition does seem to be a predominant theme in the reception of Castration Movie so far, and it does resonate with me.

Like Traps (on her friend Adeline’s unsolicited behalf), I have felt the urge to ask a stranger to read your gender—as if to dare them to misgender me—like reaching for a gun they carry. Like Turner, I have responded to getting broken up with by walking around and writing in a notebook a lot.

Like Adeline in the opening and closing shots, pulling down her shirt to expose her chest to a mirror, I have stared at my reflection, trying to see myself as a woman, my breasts as a woman’s breasts.

But I don’t want to fall into a simple enthusiasm based on recognition, especially since the film’s audience so far has been predominantly transgender like myself.

What about this film could make it a cultural conversation rather than a community phenomenon? What would make it a meaningful depiction, not just an relatable one? Castration Movie is a rich text, and not one that I’m equipped to fully examine, but I think it can speak for itself in this conversation.

I think many transgender viewers found Castration Movie fulfilling for the same reasons that its characters feel so unfulfilled. When Turner and Traps look to their own screens to, perhaps unwittingly, form their identities, the forums they choose cultivate resentment within them. Traps has a habit of looking at her reflection and forcing a smile, as if to manifest a version of herself that is happy, but it seems only to heighten the futility of her situation. It is as if she believes that transposing the expression from her face to the mirror would make her reflection an entity separate from herself, and that seeing it face to face would grant it the power to project a cheering effect back upon her.

We look outward to see inward. We seek relief through mutual recognition with externalized versions of ourselves. Yet despite our brilliant urge to be fully known, to look for meaning in reflection is to look through a glass darkly.