Young Gods

A group of friends, cocky and spoilt, are poised between adolescence and manhood. Inspired by the voyeuristic example of a rich kid among them who owns a video camera, they decide to challenge each other to film their own sexual conquests and screen them to the group. Their decision however begins to break open the veneer of their confidence and to reveal uncertainties and crises. For the confident guy who picks up a policewoman, the nerdish type struggling to have sex, the rich kid owner of the camera who gets the house left to him only to find it revealing a hidden and repressed past, and the flash boy who gets drawn into cold and agonising sex by internet, this is a boyish adventure that turns into a dark journey.J-P Siili’s debut feature has a glossy sheen and a smart style but this transforms into something colder, more clinical in a manner that is very appropriate to his subject. These young men playing cynically with the intimacies and emotions of others find themselves hoist by their own petard. The result is indeed a dark vision of contemporary human relationships in which a final redemption cannot entirely convince us to be optimistic. [S.F.]