Critics reviews

Louvart’s cinematography is so intimate it keeps you flinching, guessing, waiting to exhale. The saturation of color breathes the spaciousness of Brooklyn’s Coney Island, the freshness of air, the Americana with the Ferris wheel and cotton candy.

Ms. Hittman directs in a naturalistic style that makes the movie often feel like a documentary. But it is also spectacularly acted, and the role of Simone is played by Madeline Weinstein of “Alex Strangelove.”

Sublimated grief sharpens an already troublesome sexual appetite in this atmospheric sophomore feature, and only drugged oblivion offers respite from doubt and angst. Though it can be a challenge to sustain sympathy for protagonist Frankie, a Brooklyn teenager whose private crisis over his sexuality causes him to treat his sister, mother, girlfriend and secret male lovers with escalating cruelty, British actor Harris Dickinson brings an extraordinary depth to his portrayal.

The most powerful aspect of Beach Rats is that it is a succinct statement on how toxically masculine and homophobic environments suffocate everybody in them. It gets across the subtle range of ways in which a young gay man can feel that suffocation, from anger to ennui, from humiliation to despair.

Hittman's film, like Call Me By Your Name, and two other queer films of note, God's Own Country (Francis Lee, 2017) and BPM (Robin Campillo, 2017), has a fiercely intimate, visceral style. . . . Hittman renders the sex – on the beach, in bushes, in seedy motels – with a palpable sense of danger for Frankie alongside the thrill of carnal discovery.

With It Felt Like Love (2013) and now this second feature, writer-director Eliza Hittman comes across as a milder, less provocative version of Larry Clark (Kids, Bully). Like Clark, she explores the sexuality of adolescent and young adult characters in a manner that feels more closely related to still photography than narrative cinema; unlike Clark, she's too timid to confront her prurient interests head-on.

One unfortunate trope of independent filmmaking is the near-silence of working-class characters, as if a relative lack of formal education deprived a person of ideas, emotions, experiences, and even language itself. A new movie that ignores that narrow-minded and prejudicial convention is "Logan Lucky"; another, Eliza Hittman's second feature, "Beach Rats," confronts it brilliantly, making talk and its absence among rough-and-tumble South Brooklyn teens a painful core of the film.

What love there is in Beach Rats belongs to the camera. Rarely has the life of a bro been painted with such tenderness. The images hum with desire and, like desire, they shift uneasily between dreaminess and menace. Ocean waves sometimes soothe and beckon; sometimes they crash with rage. The garish lights of Coney Island glow with frantic possibility; but the screams of thrill riders press on Frankie, as if the inner racket of his own agony has been made external.

Shot on 16mm by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart, the film immerses you in an almost totally sensorial experience: smells, sounds, colors, the look of skin in sunlight and darkness, etc. Hittman's devotion to the male bodies onscreen is obsessive. Most good filmmakers, and most good artists, are obsessives. It goes with the territory. Hittman's obsession creates a potent blend of eroticism, pent-up feelings and good old-fashioned appreciation of beauty.

The film isn't a thesis. But it does have ideas about sexuality and, ultimately, the thin line between danger and desire. That, I think, is what sets Hittman apart. The movie ends on a dark note, with a stunning act involving Frankie's friends and one of his hookups—I won't spoil it here. For some, it'll be a mood-killer, and maybe even a dishonest departure from who Frankie is. For me, it played like a logical, if unforeseeable endpoint to what was lingering all along.

Though Hittman's obsessions were unusually refined from the start, Beach Rats opens up to a bigger and more textured vision of adolescent sexuality. . . . Hittman doesn't handle the plotting quite as adroitly — the climax is confusing when it means to be ambiguous — but Beach Rats thrives so much on observation that any turn of the narrative was bound to feel contrived. What's special about the film is how much we come to know Frankie, perhaps more than he knows himself.

On a conceptual level, it's immaculate. . . . But Hittman turns out to be a conventional storyteller; despite her evocative styling and Dickinson's surprisingly assured lead performance, her sophomore feature remains confined in monotonous, psychologically shallow coming-of-age-drama indiedom. It's a shame, as Beach Rats has one of the year's best parting shots. In a more fleshed-out film, it might have been transcendent.