Frightfest Glasgow 2024: ‘Custom’ Review
Stars: Abigail Hardingham, Rowan Polonski, Brad Moore, Samantha Steel | Written and Directed by Tiago Teixeira
Jasper and Harriet are arthouse pornographers struggling to make ends meet. Their stock in trade is producing custom-made erotic films for an exclusive clientele into the forbidden, the shocking and the strange. As they hit rock bottom, that’s when they encounter ‘The Audience’, a mysterious client offering life-changing money to perform strange rituals on videotape.
Custom is a deep dive into the world of online sex work – the custom of the title referring to video requests from paying clients, willing fork over money to have their sexual fantasies played out on camera, in a film that tries SO hard to be a Lynchian nightmare.
This is a very timely film AND subject matter given the explosion of sites like Onlyfans and Fansly and how people are making a living from them outside of the traditional 9 to 5 workday narrative. Asking questions about how far you’d go, and what personal boundaries you’d be willing to cross in the pursuit of money – for people MUST be selling their souls on those sites right? There’s no way anyone does THAT for fun?
Yes, despite protestations otherwise, Custom takes a rather prudish stance on the subject matter – our protagonist’s original “fun” idea of making money takes a dark spiral into a murky world of people selling their morals for cash. The fact that the two protagonists are “stuck”, something that is referenced as one of the character’s idea of personal hell and what [SPOILERS] turns out to be LITERAL, given that everyone is stuck in a time loop, doesn’t offer any light at the end of the tunnel either. It’s all, ultimately, a very short-sighted view that sex work = bad.
Whilst the film runs less than 80 minutes it still feels like this could have been trimmed down to a short, which isn’t surprising given that Custom comes from a director whose only previous work is short films – it’s almost like this is a “stepping stone” to a true feature-length film. There’s not enough meat on the proverbial bone to make this film truly interesting – which is probably why the runtime is padded out with numerous sex scenes and bizarre, almost psychedelic, sequences (the David Lynch influence) as both characters descend into madness…
** 2/5
Custom screened on Saturday, March 9th as part of this year’s Pigeon Shrine Glasgow Frightfest
