(0,∞)

The premise of "(0,∞)" can be summarized with an efficiency that the film itself may not share: two married men want a home loan, and the government has developed a medical procedure to check whether they are allowed to want things. Director Mar Sudac, working in a register somewhere between Kafka and a very stressed couple at a bank branch, uses the mortgage application as a delivery mechanism for a fairly comprehensive audit of state power, sexual identity, and the particular indignity of being asked to prove yourself to a functionary. The "Sx Test" is the film's central invention, a bureaucratic instrument so blunt in its allegorical purpose that it practically arrives with footnotes. It is, to the film's credit, a genuinely unsettling idea.

The speculative framework is doing considerable work here. By projecting current anxieties about LGBTQ+ legal status into a near-future "binarizing world," Sudac gives the film permission to be both a comedy and a warning. The comedy, one suspects, is the spoonful of sugar. Clark and Gus are the kind of protagonists whose ordinariness is itself the argument: they want a mortgage, not a manifesto, and the film seems to understand that the most effective way to illustrate systemic cruelty is to visit it upon people who were simply trying to refinance. The cast, led by Cheech Manohar and Brandon Wilson, appears well-suited to navigating the tonal tightrope between absurdist bureaucratic horror and something that actually stings.

The lecture energy, however, is not subtle. When your film's central metaphor is a government-administered sexuality verification test administered to gay men in a world that is described as "rapidly binarizing," the subtext has, in fact, become the text. The film earns its high marks for LGBTQ+ engagement precisely because it is not gesturing toward the subject from a safe distance. It is sitting in the waiting room with the subject, filling out the forms, and asking whether the pen is supposed to hurt this much. Whether that constitutes a feature or a flaw will depend entirely on how much allegory the viewer has already consumed this calendar year.