(Credit: QNews)
An unashamed celebration of queerness and identity, feeling like a lost 2000s Adult Swim cartoon. The humour is tailor made for me, with rat-a-tat jokes at an excellent pace from all corners of humour: visual gags, puns, background gags, one-liners, insults and screaming incandescent rage about "lesbian phones"; its madness and irreverence are front and centre, and hark back to that "era" of mad fun cartoons and whimsy. Some of the jokes are low hanging fruit (the villains are "Straight White Maleians", bisexuals "don't exist" and Clitopia is "hard to find unless you know what you're doing") and some are tailor made for the "online" (I hate that I understood the joke about the name of Roxburgh's ship...) but criticism of those tends to come from bad faith, so I'm happy to ignore that well of poisoned discourse in a world where queerness and anything differing from the norm is seen as an assault on fascists. Its funny, daft, ludicrous, a blissful ninety minutes which also impresses with its refreshingly mature ending: a thoughtful and all too often overlooked examination of relationships and how maybe it's best we don't leap into them just because we've been denied kindness all of our lives, combining it with a funny but real look at mental health and anxiety.
Highlights include Gemma Chu-Tran as a non-binary Goth musician with absolutely no thoughts and an empty head; Richard Roxburgh (because it's an Australian film: he is legally required to turn up) as the foul-mouthed starship behind the times; Auntie Donna as the villainous trio, who got some of the biggest belly laughs from me, a niche gag about drunk girls in toilets and the powerful wisdom they dispense before vanishing into the ether, and the performance of Shabana Azeez as our titular heroine, who handles her growth and insecurities excellently.
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