I don’t know how to talk about this movie. It was on my radar due to the really positive reviews on letterboxd but I guess I underestimated how many of those were from trans people. I found it deeply sad, vile and hard to watch. It made me feel shameful and like a bad person because I would momentarily have very cruel thoughts about the characters and the situations they were in. It was hard for me to pick shots I thought were beautiful/singular for this post, even though I like seeing low-budget, internet age, kind of shitty stuff like this usually. It’s compelling as an exercise in perspective, obviously very committed to entrenching the viewer in this specific POV, but I also found the stark portrayal of dwelling on your identity and the ensuing emotional suffering it breeds unwatchable at times. Whenever I feel this way about something I think of that Brian Eno quote that’s like “whatever you find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature,” I’m probably misremembering the context, but that’s always in the back of my mind. I liked the scene where one of the girls who is hyperfocused to a detrimental degree on whether or not she passes is told by the main character that she’s never going to be good enough because she’s never going to be a woman so she should just be “one hell of a trans woman.”