Goat

(Andrew Neel/2016/USA)

On face value Goat is an uncompromising, gritty look at American college fraternities and their hazing rituals. However through the experience of the main character it becomes a more general investigation of the male emotional landscape and the limiting, suffocating framework in which men express themselves, often by choice but also by coercion to partake in machismo posturing at peer level. Brad is viciously assaulted and finds refuge in the familial conceit and security in numbers of a fraternity his brother, Brett, is a member of at college. As Brad submits himself to increasingly degrading hazing rituals in an effort to be accepted Brett begins to doubt the importance or substance of the fraternity itself. When things go too far and the illusion of the fraternity is shattered the brothers lean on each other and reach a point of tenuous emotional equilibrium. Andrew Neel doesn’t shy away from showing the brutality of the archaic, ridiculous form of male camaraderie that are college fraternities in America but his film, as visceral as it is, poses some subtle questions about how boys behave and the expectations involved for boys to become men.

(3/5)