‘Horseplay’ Review: Boys Will Be Boys

Boys shall be boys, because the saying goes. In “Horseplay,” the glossy, expansive villa {that a} group of younger, straight-identifying males loosen up in for the vacations begins to shut in as their video games of machismo — dumping water on a sleeping visitor, as an example — push each other to the breaking level.

There’s not quite a lot of ahead momentum in “Horseplay,” directed by Marco Berger and set outdoors a metropolis in Argentina. Instead, the movie performs like a perverse riff on a hangout film, the “no homo” antics of a movie like Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” taken to extremes, each in its laid again tempo but in addition within the penalties of its characters playing around.

They take bare pictures collectively, ship them round, slap one another’s butts. The viewers sees one thing roil in a single member of the group, Poli (Franco de la Puente), as he gazes at a number of the younger males faking fellatio and playacting penetration. But everybody else is content material to lounge within the cognitive dissonance of the blurry boundaries of their homosocial intimacy rituals.

If solely it weren’t all a bit inert. Without a piercing viewpoint to chop to the core of this male bonding, the whole lot unspools slowly and with out propulsion. “Horseplay” is much less an acutely mapped-out anthropological research into poisonous masculinity and pervasive homophobia and misogyny, and extra like having to spend a day chilling with probably the most annoying guys you understand.

Horseplay
Not rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Rent or purchase on most main platforms.