SFF NOTES: Goat (2016, Dir. Andrew Neel)

If I were being charitable, I'd admit that Andrew Neel's Goat delivers on its promises - those promises being a solid acting turn from a Jonas brother, another bizarre cameo from James Franco and a difficult-to-sit-through account of college hazing rituals. That last promise it delivers on in spades. Goat is certainly difficult to sit through. That's kind of its raison d'être. Its barrage of hard drinking, muck smearing, sleep depriving, gut punching, toilet bowl dunking, animal fucking humiliations are given Vice-level exposure, and there's an end.

The film, which is drawn from a real life account of college hazing by Brad Land, centres on the experiences of Brad (Ben Schnetzer) as he struggles through fratboy brutality so that he can gain entry into the fraternity of his brother, Brett (Nick Jonas). The horror of his experience is compounded by lingering post traumatic stress from a recent assault. It is this emasculating event that has Brad pushing harder to assert his worth as a man and Brett questioning what that worth is actually worth as he sits complicitously by as the demeaning bar keeps getting raised.

There is a bigger story here, which Neel and his team of screenwriters, which includes David Gordon Green, have seemingly refused to engage. The pseudo-vérité approach they've taken to the material is not only difficult to watch (their primary driver, one suspects) but also a struggle aesthetically and thematically. They expend little effort contextualising the toxic masculinity that fuels these environments or having their characters necessarily grow through it; instead they've tied it all into a self-serving recovery tale that cannibalises its own point.

Those entering Goat with an understanding of masculinity's ravages will find hooks to confirm their (well-grounded) stance, but I suspect those that don't will find their own hooks for less savoury readings are just as available. It is not a long shot to predict that some commentators will see cause for complaint in what little justice there is on screen. Basically, if these young men couldn't figure out on their own that this shit is plain wrong, throwing the same men in front of this anti-polemic isn't going to do any of them any favours.

★★☆

Goat screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.