‘Best Boy’ review: A bizarre family contest unveils dark secrets in Canadian woodland thriller

Dir/scr: Jesse Noah Klein. Canada. 2025. 95mins.

Author/director Jesse Noah Klein’s genre-bending thriller Finest Boy begins at a funeral. In a gap scene that remembers Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Nonetheless Lives, grownup siblings Phillip (Caroline Dhavernas), Lawrence (Aaron Abrams) and Eli (Marc Bendavid) have assembled with their mom Anne (Lise Roy) to mourn the household patriarch. Every shares barely completely different feelings as they stand over his casket: sorrow, bitterness and possibly even a little bit of aid. This was a aggressive and poisonous man, one whose grip over the household continues after his dying. 

The movie’s depth is additional ratcheted by its eager aesthetic

Just like Klein’s earlier movie Like A Home On Hearth (2020), Finest Boy is a psychologically intense movie impressed by the sudden opening of a familial wound. The small ensemble forged authentically portrays these three embattled siblings, whereas the largely single location of a woodland cabin offers the movie some theatrical flare. These two parts, plus this fiery image’s insistence on critiquing custom and violence, ought to assist grant it a fruitful pageant run following its premiere in Edinburgh Worldwide Movie Pageant competitors.

Happening over the course of a single day in a Canadian forest, the movie is split into a number of chapters named after the rounds of an imaginary household event created by the useless man a few years in the past. It was an everyday incidence within the siblings’ childhood, they usually have reunited to compete as soon as extra after their father’s dying. Every of the three contests – which contain exams akin to who can maintain their breath beneath water the longest – pushes the endurance of every sibling. The foundations are sometimes learn by their stoic mom, who dons a viking helmet and a cape and reads from a scroll. There’s a podium for the winner, and the losers should strip off their garments and proclaim their worthlessness. This time the stakes are even greater, because the victor will even obtain a $100,000 prize. 

The angsty dynamic between siblings, nevertheless, suggests cash will not be actually an element. The trio merely wish to win in any respect prices, skilled by their father to worth supremacy. That need serves as a proof for his or her horrible lives: Lawrence’s spouse and household are leaving him; Phillip is an alcoholic; Eli is caught in arrested improvement. Every actor loudly expresses their character’s respective private ache, typically marked by yelling in scenes of main arguments that recall the work of John Cassavetes. Such bodily and emotional broadness permits these actors to go massive, inspiring a flamable sense of rigidity.  

The movie’s depth is additional ratcheted by its eager aesthetic. The large, at occasions, fish-eyed lensing neatly mirrors the pressure on the coronary heart of this household. Klein additionally leans on high-angle pictures. Although there aren’t any spectres right here per se, the indirect angle does act as a personification of their father. Curiously, the warped verticality of those pictures is much less just like the benevolent omniscience you’d obtain from a beloved spirit, and extra like surveillance footage. That alternative suggests a metaphorical translation of the toxic air this father has left round his household. 

The problem for these damaged characters it to not win. Moderately, they have to reroute the cycle of generational violence by breaking away from a practice that requires the sturdy to dominate the weak. As this household barrels towards a disturbing freakout within the woods, nevertheless, the cacophony of shouting is almost an excessive amount of to take, and it’s unclear whether or not Klein will ever make his level or simply wallow in unstable extra. However, the filmmaker serves up a quiet denouement that underscores the actual fact this unhealthy blood is thicker than initially suspected.