Review: Dear Pillow
Wes, a baby-faced emo boy who bags groceries and enjoys his father’s porn, is the center character in this independent drama. Living with his unsympathetic dad in a no-place, crappy apartment complex, Wes passes the time by spying on his landlord, Lorna, a sexy older woman who engages in phone sex. While snooping in Lorna’s mail, he comes across a neighbor’s check, sent from one of his father’s porno publications. Wes soon realizes the man is a porn writer. Intrigued by his own desire to write, Wes befriends the neighbor, Dusty, an older gay man with an agenda all his own. As Wes becomes closer with Lorna and Dusty, what ensues is a fiasco in sexuality, and Wes gets way more than he bargained for with his new adult friends.
First-time writer and director Bryan Poyser takes the coming-of-age film and pretty much kicks it in the teeth. There is no simple resolution here, and the lines between who is good and who is not is blurred beyond all recognition. Each character has a thick layer around them, and as each is peeled, another, darker one is exposed. Not without a bit of lightheartedness, Dear Pillow quietly stretches itself out and waits for you to realize that the story is probably closer to home than a lot of people might dare to admit. The thread-bare budget definitely lends to the gritty setting, but the story never suffers from it. Directed with a care and integrity not typically seen in such a small release, Poyser is definitely a filmmaker to watch in the coming years.
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