Dominant Species
2020 · 19m · USA
Directed by Joseph Sackett
Genres: comedy, LGBTQ+, sci-fi
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, surreal
Ten aliens inhabiting human host bodies attempt to learn what it means to be men, navigating social conformity and masculinity as constructed by narrow cultural and biological standards. A queer sci-fi about performance, gender, and the arbitrariness of masculine norms.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Ten aliens learning how to be men. The premise IS the critique. Sackett finds something genuinely funny and genuinely unsettling about masculinity by making it utterly literal.
Joseph Sackett's queer-sci-fi about ten aliens learning manhood is a structurally inventive way into masculinity critique — the device does conceptual work that a straight drama couldn't, and that's the whole argument for the form.
The aliens' literal inability to perform masculinity convincingly exposes how performative and arbitrary the whole enterprise is — outsider-gaze as critique with the line 'these are women, you will impregnate them' delivered to ten host bodies. Queer sci-fi with bite.