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If there’s something good to say about Down Low—and there’s not much—it’s that it’s blessedly short.
But the sex comedy-cum-murder caper-cum-coming-out romp, which premiered Saturday at this year’s SXSW pushes right up against the seams of its 90-minute runtime. From star and co-writer Lukas Gage jacking off co-star Zachary Quinto in silhouette to an absurd reference to The Creation of Adam, you can’t call this movie unambitious. But you also cannot call Down Low’s veritable playground of incessant, incomplete ideas any good.
Lukas Gage is Cameron, a twentysomething, sexually confident masseur, who makes his money giving guys happy endings. (At least, I assume that’s his job; like the rest of the movie, most of Cameron’s backstory is undefined.) His first interaction with Gary, a recently out, terminally ill divorcé, is on the massage table in Gary’s sweeping, empty mansion. Down Low taunts us with a raucously good time by having the pair’s entire meet cute involve a handjob, as Cameron asks Gary wild personal questions. (“Are your sons hot?”)
Cameron learns that Gary has never been touched by another man before—and thus, he takes it upon himself to help Gary embrace his newfound queerness. Unfortunately, Cameron’s quest to break Gary out of his repressed shell and get some hot male ass for the first time is doomed from the start. It’s not just that Gary is dying, due to an inoperable brain tumor that’s given him a month to live. It’s that the closeted man they’ve invited over from a hook-up app (called Plungr; how… creative?) jumps out of a window after a blowjob gone horribly wrong, hitting his head on the pavement below.
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Down Low careens off the rails from that point on. Gary and Cameron must clean up the mess, get rid of the dead body, and make sure no one catches them in the process. Barring the occasional intrusion of drugged-out neighbor Sandy (Judith Light, doing her best with absolute nothing) and the necrophiliac they pay to take the body of their hands (poor, sweet Simon Rex, deserving better), this is a two-hander for Quinto and Gage. It’s obvious why: Gage clearly wrote both his part and his film purely for himself.
On the flip side, Quinto is completely flat as Gary, which is not his fault—there is almost nothing to Gary. It’s a shame, because there is room for growth there, should the movie have wanted to explore it: Gary’s family has left him and gone radio silent since he came out, which he tries to spin as their decision. But as both we and Cameron start to find out that may not be exactly true, the film swerves from probing that dynamic further. Instead, Gary’s journey is sometimes getting rid of the dead body, sometimes embracing his innate hotness, sometimes getting Sandy both in and out of the confines of his large house, and sometimes getting super high, because who cares? He’s dying!
We spend a large portion of this ping-ponging narrative with Simon Rex’s chaotic, crack-smoking corpse-fucker, whose gift to the film is inciting a drug trip scene that is itching to belong to the pantheon of great drug trip scenes. (It doesn’t.) This is preceded by a literal makeover sequence that is less self-aware than it is self-satisfying, as is the drug trip itself, where the guys lip sync to an admittedly catchy but not well-known song.
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This scene, styled to be the breakout, is incredibly watchable, even if it’s not inspired—it offers genuine emotional impact, thanks to a quick, touching exchange between Cameron and Gary. But both it and much of Rex’s stretch epitomizes one of Down Low’s biggest failures: It happily traffics in well-worn stereotypes, neither with commentary nor incisive humor. Gay men love to lip sync to beats-driven electropop! They love Nicole Kidman and Bravo! They absolutely hate when you call them a Charlotte, when they are so clearly a Samantha! Valid or invalid these may be, but merely invoking them doesn’t, to me, make them funny.
Gage is particularly a culprit here, not just because he wrote the film. Cameron’s entire character is meant to be the loud opposition to Gary’s buttoned-up cultural know-nothing; that means he is happy to call things “toxic” and “triggering” and “hot” and “gay,” dialogue that is meant to pass as character-building. At least Gage is both pretty and committed to the film, which is hard to say about literally anyone else here. And while it can be fun to hear a hyper-specific reference to Pretty Woman once, Down Low’s idea of comedy is basically a pop culture bingo card, and Gage is trying desperately for us to win.
This is not a film devoid of laughs, but it is also chock full of tastelessness—whether or not you are a prude, by whom Down Low is decidedly not meant to be seen. Cameron repeatedly calls a gay man who isn’t out to his family the F slur in a pivotal, emotionally abusive act that the film fails to justify. Sandy is mostly painted as an annoying old kook, despite her being the one person from Gary’s past who seems to accept him for who he really is. And the ending hits a particularly sour note, twisting Down Low’s rare emotionally resonant moment into something far too morally appalling to be written off as “dark comedy.”
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The poor filmmaking from first-time director Rightor Doyle only makes matters worse: Nearly every conversation between Gary and Cameron is filmed in the exact same shot-reverse shot set-up; the sloppy editing patches together shots from clearly different takes; there’s an establishing shot needlessly filmed from a canted angle, a minor stylistic flare that highlights just how nonexistent the film’s vision is.
Down Low may only be 90 minutes long, but its constant teetering on the edge of implosion makes it feel longer than its runtime. But I have to thank Doyle, Gage, and co. for hitting the brakes before it was too late.
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