I was recently talking with a friend about the state of modern queer cinema. His grievances were that all representations of gayness in mainstream movies are glib, centred around coming out and homophobia, and tailored to the heterosexual gaze. I was getting into New Queer Cinema films at this point—think Gregg Araki, Jon Moritsugu, Todd Haynes, Bruce LaBruce—so, I felt defensive of cinema as queer expression on the whole. But, looking specifically at modern mainstream gay movies, my friend has a point. Recent films of this variety, like Love, Simon (2018), Handsome Devil (2016), Red White and Royal Blue (2023) and Heartstopper Forever (2026) are twee and facile, good for the representation but not terribly much else. Sparks (2026) is a much-needed divergence from this airbrushed realism of the mainstream. The directorial debut from Fergus Cambell is a wonderfully weird film, teetering around teen angst and restlessness with surreal sci-fi storytelling which, despite its shortcomings, is reminiscent of the New Queer Cinema I have recently grown to love. Although imperfectly written, Sparks is exactly the type of film we—young, queer people—need more of.

Sparks opens with Cleo (Elsie Fisher) in a heated, passenger-seat argument with her Mum, a not-so-subtle nod towards Ladybird (2017). Angry—at her family, at her prospects, at her good-for-nothing hometown of Sparks, Nevada—Cleo wanders the golden-hour streets of suburbia and stumbles across a cigarette vending machine in exactly the middle of the road. The machine ejects a packet of Marlboros (which Cleo smugly picks up and pockets) and a paperback on Jean-Luc Godard films, which Cleo starts to read, elbows on top of the vending machine with a gorgeous ambient score swirling around her.

This is the best opening to a film I have seen this year. The portrayal of teen angst is hyperbolic and self-satirising—there is no nuance to either Cleo’s or her Mum’s diatribes; there is no history or context we are privy to—and veers directly into the surreal and nostalgic, a clean metaphor for the escapist fantasies of a stifled teen in a stultifying town.

Promptly after, Cleo meets the crop, a group of similarly disenfranchised misfit queer teens who hang out in an abandoned drive-in cinema lot with vapes and beers and the coolest outfits you’ve ever seen. Cleo introduces them to the seminal works of Jean-Luc Godard in a self-important sermonesque monologue which precisely balances cinephilic passion and teen esotericism. In turn, the crop tell her about the time-travel portal at the reservoir, which they’ve been trying to use for years to no avail. Cleo insists upon travelling to 1960s Paris to be an actor in the French New Wave, planning her journey with certainty of its success. When she jumps into the time-travel reservoir, she disappears completely, and her friends are unsure whether she’s really in 1960s Paris or the bottom of the lake.

Sparks thrives in its portrayal of listless teenage years, accomplished mainly through the enigmatic time-travel portal, which is never explained nor understood by the characters themselves, but functions rather to channel their disillusionment and escapist desires. This magical realism is such a refreshing change from the quaintly realist queer high school drama. I felt like that Sparks, through its magical components specifically, actually got the emotional fingerprint of queer teenage years: uncertain, desirous verging on yearnful, trapped.

In one scene after Cleo’s disappearance, the crop return to the reservoir, from whence they’re chased away by an old and crazy redneck couple. This sounds like a John Waters bit, and the campily hyperbolised conservatism of the redneck couple—shock at the teenage drinking (one open can of premix), the obscenely thick accents, the pistol in the belt—reminded me of similar portrayals of conservatives in in Cry-Baby or A Dirty Shame. But, this scene functioned as more than campy comedy. The crop, after swimming across the lake, stumble across an entourage of sunbathing middle-ageing homosexuals—starkly surreal against the empty Nevadan countryside. The two groups talk about their experiences of disenfranchisement, not with much insight or depth, but with heart and intergenerational attentiveness. In response to one of the elder gays wistfully saying “God, you’re so lucky to be your age,” the Gen Z crop member Trip replies, “‘cept our brains are fried and the world is gonna burn or whatever.” This is the emotional essence of being young today, building on the unashamedly doomer rhetoric of early Araki movies with a new, Gen Z twist.

This general sense of listless teen years is complemented by the styling and editing choices, which at times evoked Araki with the vividly surreal wide shots and colourfully alternative fashion, and Wes Anderson with the symmetrical shots and swathes of monochrome. The characters were suffused in a hazy glow, contemporaneous, nostalgic and unequivocally dreamy, or crowded in by a claustrophobic vignette, a visual manifestation of the stultifying Sparks.

Unfortunately, despite the magical metaphors and fantastical editing, the movie was far from perfect. While Cleo was an interesting character with well-formed escapist desires, the rest of the crop seemed homogenous and uncharacterised, with no real backstory or desires. This was particularly salient when Cleo disappeared—none of the remaining characters had the drive to carry the plot forward or to make anything interesting happen, so the film meandered. The soundtrack, editing and fashion couldn’t save the film from its disappointing character work.

The dialogue, too, was also inauthentic and felt forced at times. Contrived dialogue can work well when done incisively, and at times it was, but the film occasionally slipped into territory best described as derivatively Wes Anderson when the upfront and candid dialogue was unsupported by the realities of the characters actions. At one point, Antoine, a member of the crop, was talking about how Cleo’s arrival changed things for him, and I just had to roll my eyes and accept him for his word, because all of his preceding actions and dialogue had indicated anything but. Likewise, the acting sometimes fell flat, although the hit-and-miss script is probably more to blame for this than the actors themselves.

The film finds its narrative strengths in small moments of intimacy, when the characters have real conflicts and make real attempts to make amends. It’s here—not in the metaphors, the surrealism, the meticulous symmetry nor the vivid colours—that the film is most heartfelt. Antoine confessing to his situationship that “the lowkey was kinda pretend, though. I have feelings for you. Sometimes” was ultimately inconsequential plot-wise but momentarily made him the realest character of the movie. This is what I was craving more of, and would have propelled the movie from an aesthetic, nebulously teenage journey to a compelling narrative, too. Sparks, though not groundbreaking, is nostalgic, yearnful, and fun, everything I wish for the queer cinema of this decade to be.

SPARKS will screen as a part of the 74^th edition of the Melbourne International Film Festival on the 22^nd of August and is available to stream via MIFF Online until the 30^th of August.