Castration Movie Anthology I: Traps
The first four and a half hours of Louise Weard’s towering two-parter is a triumph in no-budget filmmaking. Through her camcorder, the director has captured an anthology of gender troubles as textured and grainy as its central characters
Louise Weard’s hugely ambitious crowdfunded camcorder masterpiece is as visceral as you might hope for a film with a title like Castration Movie. The first 50 minutes of the four and a half hours-long part one, subtitled Traps, charts the pipeline speedrun of Turner (Noah Baker), from slacker/shitty-boyfriend to full-blown incel; but the anthology’s prime parable follows Michaela 'Traps' Sinclair (Weard), a sex worker whose irreverent, pugnacious personality obscures heartfelt contemplations of motherhood.
Traps takes the viewers from crusty queer flatsits to underground music venues, from heartfelt hangout scenes to unadulterated deviancy. The hand-held cinematographer captures unsimulated watersports, a real-life recovery from top surgery, and aching, improvised dialogues, all with the camera resolution you might expect from a snuff film.
Don't be intimidated by the radical length: Traps' punk attitude and obscenities make it endlessly watchable. And that generous runtime allows arcs to patiently develop, like the subplot following Traps' childhood best friend, Adeline (Aoife Josie Clemena), as she seeks to follow Traps’ footsteps into the liberating life of sex work. Characters try to respond to each other’s cries for help, unaware of how adrift they are themselves, and the theme of toxicity always slithers under the pixelated tableaux. But the filmmaker stays conscious of the pain that begets such belligerence, and in her incomplete, but monumental, debut, Weard has kept recording long enough to afford each and every asshole a humanising moment.
Out now on louiseweard.gumroad.com
Screenings in Dublin, Leeds, London and Manchester this June can be found on matchboxcine.com/castrationmovie