Worth: $14.00
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Cast:
Fionn O’Shea, Nicholas Galitzine
Intro:
“A warm blanket of a high school comedic drama.”
The question of what constitutes masculinity plays out against the backdrop of an Irish boarding school in this charming Irish teen comedy from writer/director John Bell (The Stag). Picked on by his fellow students, 16-year-old Ned (Fionn O’Shea) is a carefully cultivated collection of affectations and punk lyrics; he almost wears his outsider badge with honour. When he’s forced to share a dorm with new boy/rugby jock, Conor (Nicholas Galitizine), Ned begins to see a kindred spirit in the handsome young man when he spies him entering a gay bar.
From the get go, both our leads play well off each other as men who might not be in love with each other, but certainly love each other nonetheless. Ostensibly Ned’s story, Handsome Devil quickly focuses on Conor, still somewhat in the closet, as he’s pulled between what he wants to be and what’s expected of him. This rising conflict within him is personified by two of his teachers; the bearded toxic masculinity that is PE teacher Pascal (Moe Dunford) and the sensitive, but self-loathing English teacher, Dan, played by the always watchable Andrew Scott (Pride). Scott gets significantly more to play with here as a man whose mantra of always being yourself doesn’t dovetail neatly with the personal life he tries to keep hidden from his colleagues and students. Meanwhile, Dunford swims in shallower water as the film’s ‘baddy’, shouting and slapping his way around the school.
To be fair, Handsome Devil uses a number of archetypes that you’ll have seen in other coming of age high school dramas – the sneering bully, the stiff old dean – but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. The performances, coupled with Bell’s witty script, give the whole thing a rather comforting feeling; a warm blanket of a film that manages to tackle sexuality and homophobia with a surprisingly light, but not ineffectual, tone.
