Fantastic Fest 2025: BODY BLOW is a Dreamy, Queer-as-Hell Neon-Noir

Julian Singleton

Disgraced cop Aiden (Tim Pocock) is reassigned to a covert plainclothes unit patrolling Sydney’s gay nightlife—only to be blackmailed by seductive bartender/sex worker Cody (Tom Rodgers) and his own partner, Steele (Sacha Horler), into providing security for drag queen drug lord Fat Frankie (Paul Capsis). By night, Aiden navigates the district’s sweaty clubs, seedy bathhouses, and raucous drag shows while monitoring Frankie’s lucrative drug trade. By day, in his quiet suburban home, Aiden sheds his stoic façade—battling a crippling sex addiction with restricting hand braces and abstinence podcasts on loop. Despite Aiden’s best efforts, he falls for the tantalizing yet traumatized Cody, pulling them both into a lurid labyrinth of crime, desire, and betrayal that threatens to consume them both.

A sensuous and unabashedly Queer reclamation of 90s erotic thrillers, much of Dean Francis’ Body Blow plays as if Kenneth Anger successfully led a mutiny on the set of a Tony Scott film. The film is soaked in a delirious mix of neon, gunpowder, lube, and blood, satisfying the craving for a tense yet hilarious thriller while plunging into a chaotic exploration of sexuality and masculinity. Pointedly wearing the drag of a sleazy noir, Francis sincerely examines the performative conflation of abstinence with authority and desire with danger, resulting in a filthy, fun thriller with a lot on its mind.

Francis and cinematographer Franc Biffone give Body Blow a dizzying, theatrical look, revealing how naturally the laser-lit aesthetics of drag performance align with the Argento-esque visual palettes of cheap ’80s DTV actioners. There’s no frame of the film that doesn’t explode with color while still preserving the inky darkness that gives noir its name. There are chase scenes, bloody power-drill showdowns, and power-of-will montages straight out of bargain-bin action flicks, all set to sexy, echoey saxophones. But Francis gleefully queers them: Point Break–style pursuits are as much tops vs. bottoms as they are cops vs. criminals, while its Rocky-esque montages are about the power of chastity cages, intercut with literal cockfights. By making the fetishistic, homoerotic subtext of the genre proudly text, Francis turns action thriller cinema into something defiantly liberating.

The neon spotlights and rear-projection drives equally feel raw and real, their heightened artifice paradoxically grounding the film. Against the sterile order of Aiden’s suburban home and police station, the delirious camp of the gay district becomes intoxicating; a vitality Aiden tries and fails to resist. The result is just as breathtaking to us: an Only Cock Forgivesfever dream that, like Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please, Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding, or any number of Nicolas Winding Refn films, proves just how much substance can emerge from an avalanche of style and sexuality.

It’s also hilarious as fuck, reveling in the gloriously messy superficiality of gay nightclub culture. There are clever sight gags, razor-sharp reads, and not one but two show-stopping drag numbers. Naturally, there are erotically charged sequences set in bathhouses and BDSM clubs–not to mention straight-laced characters with side hustles selling clubwear (“What’s the name? LustyBoiFashion.”). Body Blow weaponizes its myriad stereotypes of queer superficiality and self-destruction, using them as part of its stylistic arsenal while slyly subverting the impulse to define queer life by sex and death. Francis also makes space for a thoughtful critique of sex addiction, suggesting that both Aiden’s compulsions and his radical abstinence are equally self-destructive extremes. And amid the cruisy anonymity of bathhouses and other dens of vice, signs promoting sexual health and STI testing remind us that Francis’ symphony of sluts has safety and standards on their mind.

The Scorpion-and-Frog fatalism of Aiden and Cody’s relationship gleefully fuses Francis’ love of action-movie hypermasculinity with the fearless ferocity of queer culture. Rodgers’ drug-addicted Cody is the messiest twink in the galaxy, turning femme fatale tropes into feral, genderfucked chaos ripped straight from a 2:00 a.m. go-go stage. Yet Rodgers lends a fallen-angel glamor to this mohawked, glitter-slicked demon–making it painfully clear why Aiden is just as addicted to Cody’s toxic behavior. Pocock’s Aiden commandingly queers the “loose cannon cop” archetype, playing him as a Patrick Bateman–esque creature of repression. To Aiden, authority as a cop depends on how completely he can deny himself, a discipline unraveled by his immersion in Sydney’s gay underworld. It isn’t just a nod to the ongoing debate over police at Pride and other Queer spaces: Body Blow tears into the emptiness of respectability politics and the inherent absurdity of equating such repression with power. Like Friedkin’s Cruising, Body Blow gleefully hammers at the cracks in the fetishized “masc mask,” daring both its audience and its protagonist to stop hiding behind it, no matter their sexuality.

Body Blow is a feverish, full-body genre grind, provocatively twisting beloved tropes of action thriller cinema to unabashedly hilarious and unashamedly erotic ends. Dean Francis’ film laughs, cruises, and bleeds its way to liberation, with an eagerly captive audience along for such a seductive ride.

Body Blow had its World Premiere at Fantastic Fest 2025, with a theatrical release coming from Dark Star Pictures in 2026.