In their latest collaboration, Departures, filmmaking duo Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely attempt to map the jagged terrain of trauma through a non-linear lens. The film begins at its conclusion, operating on the premise that moving forward requires a recursive look at the past. This structural choice sets an experimental tone for what is ostensibly a hypersexual drama centered on Benji (played by Eyre-Morgan) and Jake (David Tag), two men whose trysts in Amsterdam serve as a laboratory for shifting power dynamics and BDSM exploration.
The reverse-chronological structure places Departures in a lineage of films that use temporal fragmentation not as gimmick but as argument — the idea that trauma does not unfold in sequence and therefore should not be narrated in sequence. Christopher Nolan's Memento and Gaspar Noé's Irréversible are perhaps the most cited examples, though each deploys the device toward different ends. In Departures, the conceit appears designed to force the audience into Benji's subjective experience of memory: recursive, associative, resistant to clean resolution.
British Grit and Its Discontents
The aesthetic of the film leans heavily into a specific brand of British grit, drawing inevitable comparisons to Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. However, where Boyle's work felt grounded in a specific cultural urgency — the heroin crisis in Edinburgh, the economic stagnation of 1990s Scotland — Departures occasionally lapses into a performative mode that borders on parody. The directors utilize multimedia flourishes, specifically illustrations layered over key frames, to inject a sense of indie-inflected playfulness. This "do-as-we-please" energy gives the film its most distinct identity, even as it echoes the editing styles seen in contemporary queer media.
British independent cinema has long oscillated between social realism and formal experimentation, from the kitchen-sink tradition of the 1960s to the more stylized provocations of Derek Jarman and later Andrew Haigh. Eyre-Morgan and Ely seem to position themselves closer to the latter camp, interested less in documenting a milieu than in using cinematic form to externalize interior states. The illustrated overlays function as a kind of visual marginalia — annotations on the action that suggest a second, parallel reading of events. Whether this technique enriches or clutters the viewing experience appears to depend on how much latitude the viewer grants the filmmakers' tonal instincts.
The Amsterdam setting adds another layer. Historically a city associated in cinema with permissiveness and transgression, it provides a convenient geography for a story about sexual boundary-testing. Yet the film seems less interested in Amsterdam as a real place than as a stage — a neutral zone where the characters' power negotiations can unfold without the friction of domestic routine or social accountability.
Sex, Power, and the Problem of Arrival
At its center, Departures stakes its emotional claim on the cycle of dominance and submission between Benji and Jake. The film presents their dynamic with unapologetic frankness, treating BDSM not as spectacle but as a language through which both characters negotiate control, vulnerability, and the residue of past harm. This is territory that queer cinema has explored with increasing nuance in recent years, from the power asymmetries in Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake to the quieter negotiations in Haigh's Weekend.
The difficulty for Departures is one of integration. The narrative struggle mirrors the metaphor of a flight forced into an emergency landing — it reaches for a profound arrival at the intersection of sex and psychological scarring but finds itself circling the runway, hindered by a tone that prioritizes stylistic bravado over sustained emotional resonance. The multimedia elements, the fractured timeline, and the explicit sexual content each compete for the viewer's attention without fully cohering into a unified statement.
This is not an uncommon problem for films that attempt to operate simultaneously as formal experiment and character study. The risk is that style reads as evasion — that the very techniques meant to convey the disorder of trauma end up shielding the film from the vulnerability it claims to explore. Whether Departures lands closer to genuine formal ambition or to affectation may ultimately say as much about the viewer's tolerance for fragmentation as it does about the filmmakers' control of their material. The tension between those readings remains unresolved, and perhaps that irresolution is itself the most honest thing the film offers.
With reporting from Little White Lies.
Source · Little White Lies
