Boys Like You
2025 · 17m · UK
Directed by Paul Holbrook
Genres: drama
Tones: melancholic, tender, tense
A woman unfulfilled in her roles as wife and mother becomes consumed by reconnecting with a troubled young man from her past. Their shared vulnerability proves both comforting and fatal.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Holbrook is working in that precise register where longing and poor judgment are indistinguishable, and the refusal to make one character the villain is the film's most honest and damning choice.
Unfulfilled mother and troubled young man, mutual need held as both real and catastrophic — the refusal of clean moral framing is the interesting move. Worth seventeen minutes.
Holbrook refuses the clean moral frame, which is the harder choice and the right one — a chamber drama of mutual need rendered without pathologization. Quietly devastating in the British social-realist tradition.