“Charlie Kirk,” a customer calls the cocaine-and-ketamine packages Peter (Jordan Firstman) sells. The throwaway line’s casual assumption of shared callousness encapsulates Club Kid. Racially ambiguous, cherubic Arlo (Reggie Absolom), Peter’s roughly 10-year-old son, arrives at his doorstep. Peter and his coterie teach Arlo cancel culture’s pleasures through retaliation for an old friend’s perceived betrayal.
A heterosexual assignation in which Peter was raped produced Arlo. Social worker Oscar (Diego Calva) exploits the warped perspective on intimacy reflected in that encounter to groom Peter in a romcom scenario the film endorses. Instead of helping Arlo and Peter navigate immigration bureaucracy, Oscar compounds the dysfunction by dating his client’s father. Peter’s illegal finances and exposure of Arlo to adults-only environments wreak havoc on a vulnerable boy whose mother just killed herself.
The puritanical film substitutes drugs for gay nightlife’s sexual debauchery. Peter plans to replace muscle queens with straight men at his parties. Firstman never imagines how male intimacy might extend to paternal affection and responsibility. Far from testifying to his capacity for love, Peter addresses a British court about how he benefits from taking on the father role rather than what his son needs.
Club Kid’s showy, repeated opening 360-degree camera move expresses Firstman’s solipsism through an HBO series’ pedestrian style. Later, an ostentatious zoom out from Peter’s oversized rent-controlled apartment to the NYC skyline manufactures a TV fade-to-black’s treacly profundity. Firstman’s primary televisual motif traps his and Absolom’s faces, nose to eyes, in shot–reverse-shot close-ups and fragile focus. These images turn ideological indoctrination into narcotic sentimentality.
Arriving on VOD alongside Club Kid’s theatrical release, Sergio Tovar Velarde’s The Divine Tragedy offers pop culture’s corrective. Differences in production, exhibition, and reception—driven, as always, by Hollywood hype—validate subcultural truth. The funny-then-moving story follows half-brothers Cristián (Artús Chávez), whose cheating husband dumps him after 25 years, and younger party boi Roy (Pablo Gómez). Cristián moves into the apartment their father left them, intertwining their estranged lives.
On a smaller scale, The Divine Tragedy recalls 4 Moons (2014). There, Tovar Velarde created epic cinema by crosscutting and eventually intersecting four stories of gay men pursuing connection at different stages of maturation. Roy’s friend Maggie (Mónica Dionne) charges to read men’s futures, which she can see only after giving them blowjobs. Friendship makes the act unnecessary with Roy, establishing the gay man’s handshake as shorthand for intimacy and answered need. Tovar Velarde charts Roy’s confusion over genuine attachment to hunky new neighbor Esteban (Christian Ramos), and then his descent to rock bottom at a meth-fueled dungeon orgy that turns chaotic and sadistic.
Cristián clings to his failed marriage while Roy pursues multiple partners. The brothers challenge and support each other toward temperance, finding esteem and purpose. Their self-giving dependence inspires Cristián’s return to writing and acting in a one-man play. As if answering the high-concept IP culture that births Club Kid’s sitcom, Cristián retells Supergirl’s story in mustachioed drag. Her planetary cataclysm stands for his divorce; her kinship with an alien, rooted in “a shared wound,” represents healing through brotherhood. Both men struggle for closeness with their father; the “Daddy” role figures in many of their sexual escapades.
The conclusion doesn’t really work as theater but fulfills the red-velvet opening credits’ promise: textured visual form for the prologue’s anal penetration. Tovar Velarde unites the brothers’ experiences through wide-angle plans-sequences, shifting Dutch angles, and campy lighting shimmering like a stage production. The emotional peak elaborates on 4 Moons’ classic coming-out scene: another knowing mother confronts her son. Dismissing his claim to victimhood, she achieves reconciliation and catharsis. The Divine Tragedy counters the times’ fashions while resolving the familial conflicts that nourish the sappy nihilism of Club Kid.