“HARD PILL”— What If?

Amos ♦ March 26, 2012 ♦ Leave Your Comment

“Hard Pill”

“What If”?

Amos Lassen

“Hard Pill” is a daring and captivating film and an exercise in “what if?” which succeeds because it is based on personal experience. Tim, a gay man, has plenty friends but not much of a love life. He is a bit over gay culture and is one of those guys who looks for personality rather than beauty, brains rather than brawn. In doing so he becomes very depressed and wonders if he might be happier as a straight man.

Tim signs up for an experimental drug that supposedly suppresses homosexual tendencies and makes one straight. For a while he is happy—he has a girlfriend, he has duped his excess baggage that once tied him to the gay world. However, as we might have suspected, his happiness is short lived.

The characters and the focus on them is what makes this movie work (especially since the idea for the film is not new). All of the characters are real people with real problems and through this we learn that if there ever was a pill, it would affect not only those who take it but everyone around them. The moral of dealing with self-acceptance and living up to the choices one makes is strong. I agree that the entire idea for a film like this sounds dry and heavy but in this case the opposite is true and there are plenty laughs even though the subject is serious. There is a dry wit throughout the entire film.

One of the questions I asked myself was if the pill was a miracle cure or simply an attack on the gay lifestyle. I wondered what else would change in a person’s life if he or she should suddenly stop being gay. Honestly, I felt that when I read he plot synopsis of the film, I halfway expected to have to face a story about a fictional cure for homosexuality and to be brainwashed with didactic political schtick. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is an intuitive view of how people really live and a very good one at that.