Screened as part of NZIFF 2017

Beach Rats 2017

Directed by Eliza Hittman

In Eliza Hittman’s startlingly sensual study of conflicted masculinity, a Brooklyn teenager leads a perilous double life, cruising older men online while playing super straight to his homophobic homies.

USA In English
95 minutes DCP

Director/Screenplay

Producers

Brad Becker-Parton
,
Drew Houpt
,
Paul Mezey
,
Andrew Goldman

Photography

Hélène Louvart

Editors

Scott Cummings
,
Joe Murphy

Production designer

Grace Yun

Costume designer

Olga Mill

With

Harris Dickinson (Frankie)
,
Madeline Weinstein (Simone)
,
Kate Hodge (Donna)
,
Nicole Flyus (Carla)
,
Anton Selyaninov (Jesse)
,
Frank Hakaj (Nick)
,
David Ivanov (Alexei)
,
Erik Potempa (Michael)

Festivals

Sundance, New Directors/New Films
,
San Francisco 2017

Awards

Directing Award (Dramatic), Sundance Film Festival 2017

Elsewhere

British actor Harris Dickinson is hypnotising as a buff Brooklyn teenager projecting a front of churlish masculinity with his homies and his hotshot girlfriend, while craving the tenderness of men and mourning the slow decline of his dying father. Every frame of Eliza Hittman’s film pulses with desire and its denial. 

“Eliza Hittman’s second feature is very much the work of a filmmaker with her own distinctive voice, combining moody poetry with textural sensuality to evoke the dangerous recklessness that often accompanies sexual discovery. Shifting from the portrait of adolescent female experience in her striking debut, It Felt Like Love, Hittman here turns her penetrating gaze on a Brooklyn teenage boy navigating an even more pivotal transition, played with understated intensity by promising newcomer Harris Dickinson…  

Hittman folds Helene Louvart’s evocative summertime images, composer Nicholas Leon’s brooding electronic notes and the fluid rhythms shaped by editors Scott Cummings and Joe Murphy into a raw observational portrait that leaves a haunting impression in its wake.” — David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter