This review is spoiler-lite, intended to give relevant info about the plot of the film without spoiling important twists.
It behooves us to be a bit protective of TG transformation movies. They don’t come around very often, and when they do, they’re either goofy mainstream romps like Sam or It’s A Boy Girl Thing, or heady, ambiguous, difficult-to-parse art films like Pulse or Carnal Vessels. Those being the two flavors, it’s rare to find something that faithfully recreates the experience of reading the kind of stories we’re accustomed to here in our little niche. 2006’s Zerophilia has a unique form of credibility in that its end credits feature a thanks to noteworthy artists Femur and Raven from TG Comics, meaning it absolutely draws its energy from the same wellspring that I and hundreds of other readers and creators have in the past, rather than simply coinciding with them. As such, any criticisms I may have, any ways in which I thought the film might have needed more to it, comes from a place of love and appreciation.
The plot concerns Luke, a young man who is old enough to be pounding beers all day and night both around town and in the house he shares with his best bud, but also young enough that it still feels like he’s getting used to his changing body. Luke learns that he is a Zerophiliac, a condition which — after being activated by his first sexual encounter — causes him to physically change sexes when aroused.
This is a not-uncommon theme for TG media, tying sex, sexuality, desire, biological sex and gender all together, where the curse for anyone afflicted is that when experiencing desire, they’re unable to act upon it in the way they’d like. For Luke, this complicates things between him and the alluring Michelle. Also flitting around is Michelle’s enigmatic hunky brother Max, who takes a liking to Luke’s female form (hastily named “Luka,” which is an Italian boy’s name.)
Also on hand to provide information and clarity — surely without an ulterior motive — is Dr. Sydney Catchadourian, a fellow Zerophiliac with the body of an alluring female. She claims that the only way Luke will be able to choose one form or the other is to have sex with a fellow Z, i.e. Dr. Sydney themself.
The movie’s premise raises a lot of intriguing questions that it is pretty thoroughly uninterested in addressing about what it would be like to be a Z, from an interior and exterior perspective. It is pretty typical of characters in these situations to mope, “But I don’t want to be a girl!” — which I can’t deny feels realistic but not especially meaningful, as Luke gets to this point and only begrudgingly further with a few token expressions of “Well… maybe? I don’t know” as he spends a few brief moments as Luka.
Notably, there is a scene late in the film where Luka shows up in girlmode to talk to Max, fully dressed as a woman and intending to behave as one. She ends up reversing course, which is fine, but what’s missing here are the moments leading up to, and after, that scene — what of Luka coming to terms with the possibility of staying female, what about trying to see the world through a woman’s eyes, what about bonding with her female friend Janine? What was it like to embrace dressing as a woman for the first time? With the movie’s 90-minute runtime, it could have stood to spend a little less time building up to its initial transformation and a little more time examining the characters after transformations happen. The degree to which the characters are studied extends only as far as very typical and expected angst and frustration about the scenario.
Aside from the ultimate patina of self-acceptance and open-mindedness (which, yay,) the movie is short on meaningful observations about gender roles, romance, sexuality or the self. The audience has to do the heavy lifting of applying what they understand about the world onto the characters. It’s purely a sex farce about who can do what and with which and to whom. Luke likes Michelle, but surely Michelle wouldn’t like Luke if she knew he might be a girl sometimes, and then there’s Max who catches Luka’s eye but not her heart, and then there’s Dr. Sidney who has their own designs for the young Z, especially knowing one crucial piece of information that Luke doesn’t, and that threatens to doom him.
Will Luke come to terms with his transformation, and will he then be able to move forward with Michelle — and what about Max? That’s what the movie is really interested in. Like a true BTTF, there’s a problem to be solved here, and that problem is “How do I be the right person for the person I like?” — and while that sort of means growing as a person, at the outset it seems to simply mean having the right parts at the right time.
But, okay. As a sex farce, it’s fairly fun. It’s also pretty modest, all things considered. Considering the key role sexual intercourse and bodies play in the plot, the movie itself is pretty bashful about showing it — all that stuff goes on behind closed doors (or only slightly ajar ones) and is none of our business, except to feel assured it happened. I wasn’t expecting a hardcore porno or anything, but once you set sexuality as the centerpiece of your work, you could stand to be a bit more forthright with it. (There’s a small, tasteful amount of nudity but that’s not specifically what I’m asking for more of; I think there’s a way to thread the needle of being sexually frank without being explicit.)
If that all sounds like a letdown, let me assure you I think the movie is fine for what it is. Not going sufficiently deep into your subject matter isn’t a crime when you’re doing TG films: if it were, I would have liked Carnal Vessels a lot less. To praise it in another way, this film is remarkable in that it’s obviously a low-budget independent film — it looks like someone’s commtech project from the mid-2000’s — but the writing and acting is uncommonly good. There aren’t wooden performances or stilted dialogue that snap me out of the scene as there so often are in these DIY projects. The actors are well cast and I particularly enjoyed both Luke (Taylor Handley) and Luca (Marieh Delfino) — while Handley can’t always break out of the script’s need for him to be a pouting, put-upon protagonist, he seems game, and Delfino pulls off the rare trick of matching the tone of her male counterpart’s performance.
Because I had never seen this movie before, but had heard about it probably fifteen years earlier, I wasn’t specifically thinking about Zerophilia when I came up with Both. But I was thinking overall about media in which characters go back and forth across gender lines “freely” or based on some sort of trigger, and what can be done with that premise. When I was writing that one, I thought about what some of the storytelling tropes and plot points are common in works on that topic and what happens when I throw them out. Given that some of those tropes form the basis of Zerophilia, you could read that work as an indirect response to this, or perhaps as a thought experiment on where Zerophiliacs might be after several years of acceptance. My take on where to go next once the ground rules of a story like this have been established.
So Zerophilia, like any given film, isn’t all things to all people. Writer-director Martin Curland was only going to be able to make one movie on the topic (probably) and it’s good. I get to write dozens, maybe hundreds, or different works on the same topic, so I get to stretch my legs a bit more.
Zerophilia is currently available to watch in its entirety on YouTube
