This (recently added to Netflix) film was like a stranger in a crowd to me. I don't recall having heard of it, yet it's now over a decade old. The brief, quirky preview which Netflix automatically played prompted my watch of it on a whim.
It is now one of my favourite movies.
Superheroes begins as it's peppered throughout, with vignettes of seemingly disconnected footage of a delicate and scarred resting body, three female-presenting improvisational dancers, and a tranquil, natural world, in raw but vibrant grain.
What this movie tackles is deeply nuanced and profound. Its main characters, Ben (Dash Mihok), a disabled young war veteran, and Nick (Spencer Treat Clark), an even younger aspiring filmmaker, meet and approach one another under tense and uncertain terms. What follows is a remarkably beautiful, tender, horrifying (in moments), authentic, and existential-crisis-inducing portrait of human pain and connection.
Both actors play their roles with vulnerability and full commitment. While Mihok's traumatized war veteran is much easier to read, Clark's subtly reflective and lonely documentarian can be read as forever pacing between more thoughts than even his overly talkative character can put together. While the movie won't necessarily stand up to "queer themes", it can absolutely be viewed through a queer lens.
It's actually thanks in part to a lack of overt queer themes that this movie's messages can resound as more universally human than specific to demographics, when viewers may already have to reach to relate to Mihok's predicament. The lonely souls theme is strong, as is that of the difficulties of forming adult friendships. While some who have certain strong feelings about politics (war, specifically) may feel discrete moments of the film have an "agenda", this really isn't what the movie is trying to talk about. A broken and stranded person is the point, and the war veteran route is an effective analogue.
The psychology of the film is kept to a minimum, and its heart is what ends up on bare display. I can appreciate how some may feel Clark's character is bumbling, and amplifies some of the film's clumsier setups, but I believe this is intentional. This is not in any way meant to feel like a Hollywood movie, nor is it even supposed to feel like a movie. The presence of Nick's camera in most scenes subverts the very idea of this being "a film", with careful choices made whenever he chooses to let go of the device.
Superheroes is meant to be taken as a depiction of real complex suffering and love, that exists all around us, and runs wild when we don't come close to care for it. These aren't meant to be molded characters, the narrative isn't meant to follow a favoured formula, and the viewer isn't meant to have a fortune cookie answer to how it is they ought to feel about what they just witnessed. If you're looking for an easy movie with easy answers, keep looking. This movie is a treasure for those who aren't afraid to feel both horrible and hopeful for fragile humanity.
