It’s hard to have strong feelings for director Rob Williams’ latest flick, Back Soon.
It’s certainly not the worst gay film I’ve reviewed for this column. At least this one seems to be aiming for some kind of feeling and the film is technically competent if artistically uninspired.
Windham Beacham stars as Logan, a recently widowed struggling actor who finds himself strangely drawn to Guillermo (Matthew Montgomery), a reformed drug dealer who buys the house that he put on the market in an effort to distance himself from the things that remind him of his wife. Even though Guillermo is straight, he finds himself drawn to Logan as well.
From there, the film is all downhill.
Not content to tell a conventional story about mourning, Logan’s wife haunts the film as a literal ghost who beckons Logan to get on with his life. When the film eventually tells us that the reason Guillermo and Logan are attracted to each other is because wifey possessed Guillermo during a near-death experience simultaneous with her fatal car crash, it’s clear that Williams has lost the point altogether.
Is that supposed to be romantic? Wifey comes back from the dead to turn her husband gay and abet in anal rape?
Unintentional hilarity abounds. Logan’s a sleepwalker, you see. And one night, he has to crash on his new buddy Guillermo’s couch. Logan then sleep-fucks Guillermo. I swear, I’m not making this up.
Oh, and Guillermo, the macho, thuggish, gangbanging former drug dealer confesses his love for Logan to his gay best friend. Oh, you didn’t know that all macho, thuggish, gangbanging drug dealers work out at gay gyms and have a gaggle of gays to advise them on style?
I realize this makes the movie sound like more of an interesting train wreck than it actually is. Any tension is undermined by a script that denies the actors any opportunity to dramatize their inner worlds, instead requiring them to bark expository dialogue at each other.
Despite being only 83 minutes long, the film feels interminable.
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