Ladybug had its world première at FrightFest 2024, 26 August
“My handyman is hot as hell,” says up-and-coming artist Grayson Ross (Anthony Del Negro) on the phone to his agent Wendy (Scout Taylor-Compton) near the start of Ladybug. “I thought I was in a porn.”
Tim Cruz’s feature, co-written with its star Del Negro, is in fact horror, as is indicated in a brief prologue that shows a figure dragging what is clearly a wrapped corpse along the porch of a country cabin at night. Even the name of the handyman (Zachary Roozen), Sawyer, matches what would become the surname of the killer family in the sequels to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) – but as he keeps showing up in the cabin to which Grayson has retreated for some peace, quiet and solitude, Sawyer’s lines like “This job is always getting me wet” and “These pipes haven’t seen action in a long time” really do sound like they are lifted straight out of gay erotica.
Indeed Sawyer’s relationship with Grayson plays out, at least initially, as a brewing romance, as Sawyer fixes the twinkish painter’s plumbing, turns his lights back on, poses (naked) for his art and even gets a massage for his pains. Grayson may be seeking refuge from a troublesome ex and the hustle and bustle of New York City in his family’s cabin on the margins of small-town Bedford, Pennsylvania (in fact shot in Bedford, Kentucky), but he is constantly interrupted from his work by a mysterious figure watching from the tree line outside, by a weird woman (Lisa Thornhill) searching for Sawyer, and of course by Sawyer himself.
Sawyer, it will turn out, has his own aspirations as an amateur artist, and is soon finding his way into Grayson’s work as a subject, even as, at night, some genius loci or force of artistic expression seems to be taking possession of Grayson and working through him to create art which is themed, precisely, around issues of split identity. So on the one hand Ladybug is concerned with the complexities of an artist’s inspiration, when even the most singular-seeming works emerge from collaborative processes and ideational confluences – while on the other, it is a gay ghost story. For Sawyer is stuck in this farmhouse and in time, a victim who is not afraid to instrumentalise and even victimise others in his pursuit of justice for what has happened to him – and if his lovesick loneliness and indignation chime with Grayson’s own, that just makes them perfect partners in both art and revenge across different eras and different planes of existence.
Meanwhile, much as, in small, and small-minded, communities, gay men often have to remain closeted and disguise their true selves, Ladybug also explores the way that telephonic or online communications and even art itself, can provide convenient places for those with secrets – and identities – that they wish to hide. Indeed, something similar is being instantiated by the film’s own adoption of multiple genres, each a different guise for what remains the same essential story. For no matter how varied and altered its settings and circumstances, a ladybird, like a leopard, never really changes its spots.
strap: In Tim Cruz’s gay love/ghost story, an up-and-coming artist’s work is repeatedly reappropriated by different spirits of expression
© Anton Bitel
