Fairyland (2025)

Director Durham's debut is a competent if somewhat standard biopic of writer Steve Abbott, queer activist who died of HIV related complications in 1992 told from the perspective of his daughter, writer Alysia Abbott. I have a lot of thoughts about that, a queer story filtered through a straight lens, and how that colours the way the story is told. Based on her memoir, the film becomes her story, the experience of being straight in a queer world. There is something to that that is worth exploring. 

Fairyland is about a young woman growing up in a "bohemian culture" after her mother dies in a car accident and she is raised by her gay father. It attempts to show how beautiful this unorthodox upbringing was. Despite this there the film still has a feeling of "in spite of" which pulls the film in different directions which it never quite manages to balance. The film's answer is to do the standard arc of a child pushing back against their parent to eventually reconnect just before its too late. While this is a true story it does feel a bit trite and over simplified. 

I'm probably being too hard on the film which is generally quite watchable and lovely in how it portrays this relationship between these two people, father and daughter. But for me there are two other films here which could have potentially been far more interesting and original; (1) a film about the magic of growing up outside the heteronormative conventional culture (something this film never quite manages to quite do), and (2) a film about the man himself, told from his point of view. I imagine how fascinating it would be to watch a film about a queer writer who lived and breathed at a time of great upheaval and struggle for that community and died as of a result of the larger nation's indifference to the health of queer men. 

Anyway, despite all of my gripes, Fairyland is still a lovely little movie that I think general audiences will enjoy. It is an accessible film that doesn't make anything seem to radical or threatening. Perhaps that's why it wasn't all I wanted it to be despite still being a good, watchable film. 

Fairyland

Starring: Emilia Jones, Scoot McNairy, Geena Davis, Cody Fern, Maria Bakalova, Adam Lambert

Writer/Director: Andrew Durham