Star Rating:

Something Must Break

Director: Ester Martin Bergsmark

Actors: Iggy Malmborg, Saga Becker, Shima Niavarani

Release Date: Friday 3rd April 2015

Genre(s): Drama

Running time: 85 minutes

An intimate portrayal of a first love, don’t let Something Must Break’s hardcore graphic sex scenes detract from the softness and tenderness at its heart.

Sebastian (Becker) is a twenty-something-year-old with dreams of a movie romance, that all-encompassing, can’t-live-without-you kind of love. With his androgynous looks, Sebastian sometimes slips into his Ehle persona, who is equally obsessed with finding the one but also prone to indulge in sordid and violent threesomes. When Sebastian is saved from a beating by the handsome Andreas (Malmborg), he falls head over heels in love. But Andreas isn’t ready to accept his homosexuality…

Despite the hero’s tendency to romanticise things, director Ester Martin Bergsmark (Dirty Diaries) constantly brings the story back to reality lest Sebastian lose himself completely to the fantasy. There’s a naked frolic in a stream… right next to a sewage pipe. He keeps Andreas’s tissue, bloody from when he defended Sebastian from a muscular yob. There is no silhouetted, jazzy-scored sex scene. Bergsmark gives the scenes of love a sense of imminent violence too. The fragile Sebastian cruises public toilets and dank, poorly lit backrooms looking like a delicate flower beamed into hell, and is never too far away from a kicking; a nice guy he meets in the park turns out to be a self-hating psycho, and the underground strobe-lit club Sebastian frequents has an Irreversible seediness to it.

This beauty is pit against ugliness throughout as Sebastian and Ehle fight for control: "You’re so beautiful I want to vomit," Sebastian says in and around a terrific love sequence set to a tender synth pop tune but one that boasts real vulgar lyrics. One beautifully shot slow motion scene sees Sebastian cradled by a man, only for another to urinate in his mouth. Meanwhile, Sebastian’s narration is like something culled from a Tindersticks song, where doom and hope collide.

But Something Must Break doesn’t have it entirely its own way. If Sebastian’s identity is explored in depth, Andreas never moves beyond ‘confused’. We’re never sure why he’s attracted to Sebastian/Ehle and while his flip-flopping ("I’m not gay," he protests) creates dramatic tension and spurs Sebastian to grow into himself, Andreas remains a cipher.

Moving and surprising, Something Must Break is up there with recent LBGT outings Laurence Anyways and Blue Is The Warmest Colour.