52 Films by Women Vol 3. 12. BEACH RATS (Director: Eliza Hittman)
One of my favourite film titles of all time is ‘What Rats Won’t Do’. You have a rodent who noses around looking for food, biting indiscriminately and spreading disease. Then there is something that it would treat disdainfully, an invitation it would turn down. Incredible! At any rate the film didn’t live up to its title; in fact it didn’t get a cinema release. So ‘What Rats Won’t Do’ is still a mystery. This brings me inelegantly to Beach Rats , a film written and directed by Eliza Hittman (born 1979), whose previous credits include It Felt Like Love (2013) and the short, F orever’s Gonna Start Tonight (2011). It is about a young man, Frankie (Harris Dickinson), living with his mother (Kate Hodge) and sister in Brooklyn, who repeatedly visits a gay chat room and looks at who’s on offer. To those who ask, he explains that he doesn’t know what he likes. In a shot quite late in the film we see him framed against a sign that reads ‘electric closet’. Frankie is in the electric clo...