Review:
‘Soy Boy ’: Atticus Orsborn’s Surreal Comedy Takes on Toxic Masculinity
Written and directed by Atticus Orsborn, “Soy Boy” is an over-the-top independent comedy about masculinity, shame, misogyny, and the performances men create when they cannot—or will not—confront themselves.
Orsborn produces with Claire Mack and Noah Fowler. The cast includes Taylor Gray, Jake Hart, Marie Faustin, Charlie Foster, Julius Reese, John Selby, Leo Kim, Claire Mack, Joyce Keokham, and Alix Elias. Fowler is the cinematographer.
After a humiliating video goes viral, Tim tries to fix himself in the way he believes a young man should: by looking for growth, language, and permission. He lands at a positive masculinity workshop led by Father Eagle, where men gather to excuse the parts of themselves they are ashamed of and justify the victimhood they believe they suffer.
What begins as self-improvement becomes a pressure chamber. Good intentions, half-digested ideology, emotional performance, and raw insecurity collide in increasingly absurd and misogynistic ways.
When a group of radical feminists raids the retreat and kills Father Eagle, the workshop descends into chaos. Tim and the other attendees must confront the gap between the men they perform for one another and the men they actually are.
I will not spoil the ending, but it is as wacky as the rest of the film.
Atticus Orsborn is in on the joke. “Soy Boy” brings the dangers of toxic masculinity into the proverbial classroom through surreal humor, and I am grateful for it. The comedy does not make the subject less serious; it gives the film a way to expose male entitlement, insecurity, and misogyny without delivering a lecture.
Father Eagle is a cut-and-paste version of everything wrong in our male-run society—only weaker. He is the 99-cent-store version of patriarchal authority: a bargain-bin guru selling grievance, recycled self-help language, and false certainty.
The radical feminists are hilarious and provide the disruption the film needs. Still, violence should not be answered by violence. In some ways, they begin to resemble the men they are chasing, which gives the comedy a more complicated edge.
The men, meanwhile, do not change. That failure leaves the audience with the larger questions: Can men ever change? And if they can, where are the role models for positive change?
The film’s humor should not flatten the reality behind its satire.
Globally, about one in three women—an estimated 840 million women and girls—have experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner, non-partner sexual violence, or both. In 2024, nearly 50,000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or other family members worldwide; that equals an average of 137 deaths every day, and such killings accounted for 60 percent of the intentional killings of women and girls that year.
That is why “Soy Boy” works. Orsborn knows the facts are ugly, but we should not look away simply because they are disturbing. The film is not laughing away the crisis; it uses comedy to expose how absurd, destructive, and deeply embedded these attitudes are.
The press notes compare “Soy Boy” to the love child of “Fight Club” and “Bottoms,” raised on “This Country.” I will lean into that description.
But I end where I started: Atticus Orsborn is in on the joke. “Soy Boy” reflects the deeply disturbing realities of how a large majority of men move through the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment