Part of falling in love is accepting that in almost every circumstance, you’re either endgame … or you’re not.
A relationship with a prospective partner will either dissolve for one reason or another at some point—be it through a melodramatic breakup, gradually growing apart, moving away or something else—or you’ll be together until one of you dies. In overly simplistic terms, falling in love is deciding that they’re the person you want to be with until one of you dies—or the relationship ends. There are really only two offramps for that journey.
Enter Spoiler Alert, which comes with a caveat in its very premise and title. This is going to be a love story, and, as the subtitle of TVLine founder Michael Ausiello’s memoir the film is based on suggests, spoiler alert: the hero dies.
The hero in this case is Kit (Ben Aldridge), the long-term boyfriend of Michael (Jim Parsons). The film opens with Kit and Michael at the end of Kit’s difficult battle with cancer, before flashing back to trace the pair’s 14-year relationship through falling in and out of love, many Christmases together and Kit’s ultimate decline and death. Its release timing is somewhat coincidental, according to Ausiello, but the film’s trailer and marketing highlights that it is a gay holiday rom-com … of sorts.
“Christmas was a big part of our relationship. You know, Christmas was sometimes a source of conflict. But mostly it was a source of extreme joy,” Ausiello says in an interview with Xtra.
And so, the passing of time is marked with Christmases in Michael and Kit’s tiny New York apartment, from found family dinners over the years to the RuPaul’s Drag Race holiday special.
I’m not usually a weepy moviegoer, but admittedly, Spoiler Alert hit me hard. It turns out the secret sauce for me crying in a movie is an incredibly well-placed Julien Baker song over a particularly sad montage (seriously, go listen to “Sprained Ankle” while thinking about the love of your life slowly dying and tell me you don’t cry!).
The fact it is based on a true story is what grounds Spoiler Alert and makes its potentially overly sweet perspective on love not only tolerable, but incredibly poignant. Watching Michael and Kit fall in love while knowing how the story ends—not only in the film, but in real life—becomes profoundly effective at communicating the stakes at play. In that way, the film at times feels like a tribute project, and yet another step in Ausiello’s own grieving process, as he explains.
“The process of the movie has been much more enjoyable for me than the process of writing the book, which was very isolating and lonely and emotionally traumatic, mostly because it came so soon after Kit had died; I was still grieving,” he says. “I feel like I’m on the other side of that initial grieving process. So I’m able to enjoy and appreciate how amazing this experience is and how lucky I am to be in this position.”
The film utilizes inventive breaks with genre, including Michael’s childhood shown through the lens of a network multicam sitcom—laugh track and all—and a pivotal and heartbreaking scene playing off of network medical dramas and their propensity for killing off beloved main characters.
It’s impossible to discuss this film without putting it in the conversation with its peers of 2022. Spoiler Alert comes in the year of the gay rom-com, with the previous releases of Joel Kim Booster’s effervescent Fire Island in June, and Billy Eichner’s much-hyped major-studio endeavour Bros earlier this fall. Future university film studies students may look at them together as three different ways to approach a gap in queer stories on popular film.
Where Spoiler Alert most succeeds in comparison to these, however, is its origin. Where Fire Island adapted a canonical story in Pride and Predjudice for queer audiences, and Bros felt made in a Hollywood factory to be a capital-Q “queer rom-com,” Spoiler Alert is a smaller look at gay love based on a gay love story that really happened. That realism will make you think deeply about the ups and downs of your own relationship or relationships of your past. While watching Michael and Kit settle in for their weekly Drag Race viewings, vacation with Kit’s parents (Sally Field and Bill Irwin), go through couples counselling and navigate a hilariously staged Smurf obsession, I continuously thought of my partner, and the small moments we share and cherish.
And as Kit’s health declines, it also made me think of what would happen to us, or to any couple I know and love, if we were faced with a similarly impossible challenge. When I asked Ausiello about his favourite Drag Race queen, expecting a moment of levity to pepper into this story, he revealed he hasn’t watched the series since Kit’s passing.
“That’s the one thing that feels like sacred ground for me—so sacred that it’s too difficult for me to experience that without him,” Ausiello says. “So, the last Drag Race episode I watched was the last one that I watched with him.”
That tiny detail, accompanying a film filled with them, hits right in the gut. You go into Spoiler Alert knowing how it ends, but that doesn’t make the journey any less worthwhile.
Spoiler Alert is in theatres Dec. 2.
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