Rating: NR | Runtime: 85 minutes
Release Date: May 8th, 2026 (USA)
Studio: Obscured Releasing
Director(s): Elliot Tuttle
Writer(s): Elliot Tuttle

She didn’t know to be better.

It’s not that nothing is taboo in Elliot Tuttle’s two-hander. It’s that Blue Film isn’t afraid to confront the inherent complexities within taboo. And just because he dares to voice the similarities (and contrasts) between fetishism and pedophilia doesn’t mean he’s equating the two either. More than the acts themselves, Tuttle is interested in the shared emotional struggle these two characters must reconcile within themselves to find inner purpose and acceptance.

The whole is a constant push and pull between opposites. Morality and criminality. Pleasure and pain. Dominance and submission. Nature and nurture. Tuttle brings in religion as a defense and refutation. He provides Aaron (Kieron Moore) and Hank (Reed Birney) with masks that they’ve each tricked themselves into believing to escape the reality of their pasts. This vulnerable evening of confession proves as cathartically pure as it does damningly hypocritical.

It’s all part of its unsettling erotic appeal. Two self-proclaimed perverts candidly describing their pervasions without judgment beyond an intriguing demand for dignity when it comes to their customers/victims. There’s a self-awareness via hindsight that might surprise in certain instances—not to earn Hank forgiveness or empathy as much as leave room for human consideration. Some will surely suggest Blue Film seeks to blur lines, but I’d argue it makes them clearer.

Tuttle says this is his response to “the [exhausting] discourse surrounding sex in contemporary cinema,” but it’s also towards the equally frustrating discourse that demands films with flawed and irredeemable characters be dismissed as flawed and irredeemable as a rule. No, one of cinema’s greatest strengths is using fiction to give shape to our dark realities and reveal nuance. Heroes and villains are reductive constructs. Aaron and Hank are but (superbly performed) men.

---

Kieron Moore and Reed Birney in BLUE FILM; courtesy of Obscured Releasing.