'Masc' Review: Identity Built Through Imitation — SkimNews
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- "Masc" centers on Robin (Joshua Griffin), an observer who studies other men in his orbit and almost never initiates action himself, making the audience inhabit his perspective as he searches for a personality blueprint.
- Robin is queer, biracial, and neurodivergent, and changes his appearance five times across a year while working as an apprentice handyman, lab assistant, attending a therapy group, and seeking camaraderie with peers.
- Joshua Griffin appears in nearly every frame and carries the film through a performance the review praises for physical control, jittery-but-grounded presence, and close-ups that broadcast everything the character is feeling.
- Director Bertil Nilsson wrote the film based on a story he crafted with Griffin, and the review characterizes the result as having the feel of an observational documentary even though it is clearly fiction.
- The film includes imagined and wished-for scenes, including an overnight stay with friend Benji (Tega Alexander) that lays bare Robin's vacillating hopes and fears about intimacy.
- A long scene between Robin and his father (Lincoln Conway) is singled out as the moment Robin is most unguarded, where familiar masculinity may be the form he has been searching for all along.
- The review frames the film's thesis: identity is not discovered but continually negotiated through imitation, desire, and rejection, making the film distinctively argue that for those outside prescribed masculinity, becoming oneself requires first learning to read everyone else.
Why it matters: The review positions "Masc" as a character study in which the act of observing becomes the engine of self-construction, anchored by Joshua Griffin's nearly full-time screen presence and a script Nilsson built from a story he crafted with Griffin. With Robin changing appearance five times in a year and the film deliberately folding in imagined scenes, the work treats identity formation as an ongoing negotiation rather than a revelation, giving queer, biracial, neurodivergent interiority a procedural cinematic form.
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