Film Review: Boy Erased
© Focus Features
As of 2018, 36 states lack laws that ban gay conversion therapy on minors. 68% of the U.S. LGBT lives in those states without laws in place to protect children from a practice that lacks any scientific basis, and leaves them at a higher risk of suicide. In 2004, Garrard Conley was forced to undergo this atrocity; 14 years and a memoir later, the film Boy Erased seeks to bring his story to the silver screen.
Director, writer, and actor Joel Edgerton and lead actor Lucas Hedges approach Conley’s story with an incredible sensitivity. As protagonist Jared Eamons, Hedges adopts a nuanced performance that balances the introverted and closed off nature of the character with subtle gestures and glances that hint at his inner turmoil.
The facility where this “treatment” takes place is more like a cult compound than any psychiatric care center; its workers move around with military-esque jerks and false smiles stretched painfully over their faces, religious iconography hangs overhead constantly as a threat. The language of the conversion program is that of perverted therapy. Patients are made to create family trees that detail all of their relatives’ sins in order to pinpoint the origin of their own deviance, isolating them even further from family support and self-worth. These children are further made to confess their crimes in front of each other, but this act of group therapy only serves to further shame them and guilt them into hiding away who they truly are.
Edgerton’s performance of Viktor Sykes, the head therapist of the facility, is like that of a predator in its element. Sykes’ full body is rarely ever shown on screen; instead he is made known through the slight movements of a hand that grips a frightened child’s shoulder, the sound of his voice directing everyone in the room to stare obediently at the unseen body just out of frame, There is a constant acknowledgement of the power he has over the children before him. Power he uses to break them down and turn them against their own selves. It is this constant threat that drives much of the narrative of the film, and Edgerton uses it masterfully to convey the story.
While most of the screen time is dedicated to telling Eamons’ journey, the camera routinely focuses on those others around him as they undergo the same torture. Both Eamons and the viewer watch as these children are forced to brutalized, cut off from the rest of the world, and made to psychologically self-destruct. As much as the film is about its protagonist, its narrative is built upon the silent suffering of those around him. By the film’s end there is a tacit acknowledgement that Eamon is the lucky one.
Boy Erased comes to theaters November 1st.
You can watch a trailer for the film here.
