When the movie was over, there was silence all around me, a hush unlike the end of a multiplex popcorn film; whether it was from shock, or deep thought, or sadness - or even, as I felt, a mixture of all three - it was an eerie feeling. The end of the movie is as powerful and haunting as the end of the book, something that doesn't leave you instantly as the lights go up but raises emotions and questioning thoughts that last.
The story starts, in the movie as in the book, with Brian Lackey (played as a teen by Brady Corbet) coming to one night, nose bleeding, huddled in the crawlspace beneath the family house, the previous five hours lost in his mind. He is eight years old. Over the same summer, Neil McCormick (played as a teen by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is seduced by his Little League baseball coach, left in his care by his too young and carefree mother. He is also eight.
The movie then follows the two boys, in fits and starts, over the following ten years in their neighbouring quiet Kansas towns. Neil grows up glib and cruel in his good looks, yearning for the 'love' the coach felt for him but only succeeding in having squalid sex with strange older men, believing only in the control it seems to give him. Brian grows up awkward, asexual, believing that an encounter with aliens explains those missing hours, his nightmares. The momentum of the movie is strange but compelling - even as the story diverges into the different lives the two boys are living, there's the feeling that they are only heading towards each other, as Brian begins to remember Neil as part of those missing hours, the keeper to his missing memories, and searches him out.
It is a very hard movie to watch at times. The actual abuse is not shown, and yet the scenes leading up to Neil's loss of innocence is terrible in its foreboding, as we see the tricks his coach uses to hide his real purpose in befriending the child. Neil in adulthood stumbles his way as a hustler from one trick to another, meeting johns both pitiful and pitiless, and one rape scene is so brutal that, off-screen as it is for most part, I had to close my eyes for its duration.
And yet, it's a darkly funny movie too. Odd as it felt, at times I couldn't stop from seeing the humour and reacting out loud, as choppy waves of laughter crossed the audience. Brian at first searches out another 'alien encounter believer' through a TV show, and their relationship is so gauche that the ridiculous becomes funny, while in turn pathetic and insightful. There are moments too in Neil's life that are crazy enough to be shocking as it is guiltily amusing, such as his Halloween torture of another child.
In the end, it may seem obvious what really happened to Brian in those missing hours, but the truth is more terrible than either boy should have to bear. The power of the reveal is all these things - awful and shocking, as Neil retells in graphic detail what happened that night, that the coach not only abuses boy boys, but makes Neil an unwitting accomplice in Brian's suffering; but also redeeming, as Brian finally erases the fantastical for reality, harsh as it is, as Neil starts to erase the fantasy of the coach as someone who loved him. But it's hard to sit there and take it in, no images but two boys on the cusp of adulthood in age coming to terms with the whole truth, that one person took away their childhood a long time ago.
The ending of the book is one of the most beautifully written passages, and the movie comes close to matching the loveliness in the pathos. It ends, with hope and terrible sadness; Brian cradled by Neil and crying, in the living room where the abuse happened, the strains of Silent Night floating over them as Neil finally comes to understand a kind of tenderness, but also knowing that what binds them is that they will never be able to leave the terrible knowledge of abuse behind.
To think on it, it is an uncomfortable film to enjoy - the way the consequences of the abuse are conveyed are challenging and interesting, the film itself is beautiful and elegant, the acting is really good in many cases (particularly the two male leads), but the brutal intensity of the material scares me too. I want to see it again, and I don't want to see it again either, if that makes sense.
