Humpday

Director: Lynn Shelton

2009 / 94min / 35mm

Reunited after a decade apart, old pals Ben and Andrew (Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard) decide to make an amateur gay porn together to submit to Seattle’s HUMP! film festival. Complicating matters more than a little is the fact that both are, insofar as they know, heterosexual, and the whole idea was born of a “mutual dare.” What could easily have been a sniggery, one-joke affair becomes something much richer in the hands of Shelton, who tragically died in 2020 at age 54: a film about trust and intimacy that strips all the macho bluster from the buddy comedy to prod at the niggling insecurity underneath.