There are few things that are certain in life, and crying a lot after watching the latest queer love story, 'Spoiler Alert' featuring Jim Parsons, is now one of them.
As the title of the film implies, the beginning contains one major spoiler – one of the heroes is going to die.
Although this might seem like it will soften the blow of the inevitable fate of our leading characters, it does anything but.
After ripping the rug out from under the audience so early on in the piece, 'Spoiler Alert' goes on to detail a beautiful and touching queer love story between Michael (Jim Parsons) and Kit (Ben Aldridge). The story is based on the memoir 'Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies', by author Michael Ausiello.
Michael is an awkward geek, chained to his job and relatively unlucky in love. Enter Kit, the handsome man he never envisioned would fall for him, and the two of them begin a beautiful love story. Charting the course of their 13-year relationship, the film explores Kit coming to terms with his sexuality as he awkwardly comes out to his mother Marilyn, played perfectly by Sally Field. Together Marilyn and her husband Bob provide Michael with the loving family he never had, as they embrace the romance of Michael and Kit.
Michael’s personal childhood journey is charted through a series of sitcom-style flashbacks exploring his life as an FFK (former fat kid), his struggles as the middle child and the eventual death of his mother to cancer at a young age, making the story all the more heartbreaking.
Although theirs is a touching love story, it’s tackled with humour and grace, not shying away from the bigger issues that face any couple in a long-term relationship. Parsons as Mike is geeky, introverted and loveable while equally imperfect. Aldridge as Kit is more than the 'hot side piece', he’s complex and needy while also just as loveable as Parsons. The two make a complex couple, rife with the beauty of the insecurities that arise during their relationship.
However it’s the journey towards their inevitable end that draws the viewer helplessly forwards with the protagonists. Knowing what is to come, unable to look away, creates a complex and heartbreaking relationship between the viewer and the characters on screen. The raw tenderness of a love they are about to lose, in a world they so painstakingly built together, on the precipice of death, is harrowing and beautiful.
'Spoiler Alert': You might cry, but you’re going to love every moment of it.
This story originally appeared on our queer sister site, FROOTY.
