Cycles (2022)

So two brothers arrive at the university halls of residence where it’s pretty clear from the beginning that the younger (Henry Fisk) is a bit nervous and a little bit apprehensive but luckily his older brother (Henry Wilson) is there to give him some much needed confidence. They enter a fairly small, but functional, room and that’s where the gist of this two-hander pans out. What follows now features a conversation between the two young men that shines a light on the changing nature of their relationship. It seems that they were once very close, but now the elder brother has a girlfriend and has got engaged the younger one has begun to feel neglected. He feels alone and isolated and as this increasingly intense chat continues, it becomes clear that he has a secret he is reluctant to impart, despite the obvious affection on display from his concerned sibling. The two performances here are actually quite convincing. The problem is more that the dialogue is contrived to create an atmosphere of hostility that neither character individually really imbues. It’s obvious that the director is trying to make a point, and obviously he’s using his characterisations to make that point, but after about ten minutes, he starts to labour the message and this stops being an affectionate appraisal of a maturing and evolving sibling affection and becomes something altogether more repetitious, shallow and maybe even empty. It can’t have had much of a budget and the two actors do present well, but perhaps if this were half an hour shorter with a more condensed emphasis on the salient points and less repetitive meandering and waffle, it would’ve made for a better analysis of just how we grow up around each other and at how the nature but not necessarily the fabric of love changes. Still, it’s worth a watch.