If you’ve ever found yourself on the outside looking in, then you are probably familiar with the coping strategy of acquiring the identity of a movie character in order to gain legibility within the situation. The central character of Jenni Olson’s mesmerizing essay film is a gender dysphoric, Midwestern tomboy who is drawn to borrowing masculine personas from Hollywood characters as a mode of understanding how to deal with being drawn to unavailable women. A fascinating and unlikely reinvention story, The Royal Road simultaneously explores cinematic spiritual channeling, the conquest and colonization of Mexico and the American Southwest, fading historical Californian urban landscapes, and the passions found in butch identity to achieve an achingly beautiful and poetic defense of remembering. Probing roads from El Camino Real, to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, to the road right outside the front door, Olson crafts a deeply intelligent and transcending observation of the human condition that reaches for redemption in the embrace of history, nostalgia, mindfulness, and sheer beauty. If you give yourself over to it, it will crack you wide open.

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When Leah (Gaby Hoffmann, Girls, Transparent) and music agent June (Ingrid Jungermann,The Slope) move into a spacious apartment with their infant daughter, Lyle, they have a seemingly perfect life; Leah is about to give birth and June’s current music act is about to take off in the charts. But Leah soon suspects the apartment block holds dark secrets; their downstairs neighbour fakes a pregnancy, and with June becoming increasingly distant, Leah finds comfort in talking with the beautiful model upstairs… but can anyone at all be trusted? Language: English Lyle is that very rare treasure – a lesbian horror film with a palpable sense of unease and creeping paranoia that builds until the final shocking scene. (PT) “Director Stewart Thorndike has re-imagined Rosemary’s Baby for the 21st-Century” – Cinesnatch

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