Curtain Down
2017 · 24m · USA
Directed by Emett Casey
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
Fading film siren Storme Du Bois grapples with aging, desire, and queer mentorship (from a Margaret Cho mentor figure) in a dreamy satirical farce.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Curtain Down walks a tightrope between sincere queer mentorship and theatrical absurdism that could collapse into either direction—and it doesn't; Casey lets both live in the same frame, which feels genuinely rare.
The film locates itself deliberately in a lineage of camp drag performance and Hollywood decline narratives, executing that conversation with formal precision in the editing and a sharp awareness of tonal registers.
The decision to play Storme's desire and vulnerability straight while everything around her dissolves into farce—that tonal asymmetry between character and context—is what makes this work; it's a single choice that reframes the entire 24 minutes.