Test

At first glance, Test appears easy to summarize: a drama about a gay bodybuilder attempting to earn his professional card. Yet that description captures only the film’s most marketable surface. Directed by Sam McConnell and written by its leading actor, Brock Yurich, the film uses competitive bodybuilding as a striking metaphor for the identities people construct in order to survive. Its hero, Eddie Owens, has transformed his body into an imposing monument to discipline, but beneath the muscle is a man who has never been allowed to decide who he wants to be. He lives in working-class eastern Ohio with his possessive, alcoholic mother, whose religious convictions coexist uneasily with her volatility. By day, he waits tables in a barbecue restaurant; at night, he performs anonymously for paying viewers on a cam site, using the physique that is supposed to carry him toward respectability to finance that very ambition. The contradiction is central to the film: the body that gives him purpose is also a product, an armor and, increasingly, a prison.

The opening establishes this tension with remarkable economy. Eddie’s mother enthusiastically applies his competition tan while he stands almost naked before her, and their playful familiarity initially makes them seem closer to siblings than parent and child. It is an amusing, affectionate scene until its strangeness begins to register. She is not merely supporting Eddie; she has made herself indispensable to every part of his life, acting as manager, nutritionist, coach and spiritual guardian whether or not she is qualified for any of those roles. Tammy Blanchard gives this difficult character a bruising mixture of love, jealousy and self-deception. She can make Eddie laugh one moment and undermine his confidence the next, clinging to religion as both consolation and instrument of control. The performance refuses the easy comfort of turning her into a straightforward monster. Her devotion is genuine, which makes the damage she causes more painful. When Eddie finally seeks professional guidance from former bodybuilder Mike Reed, played with stern, watchful authority by Mike Edward, his mother reacts less like a concerned parent than someone terrified of losing ownership of her son.

Under Mike’s direction, Eddie’s training becomes more rigorous and considerably more dangerous. His new coach understands what judges expect, corrects his posing and changes his drug regimen, introducing insulin despite its potentially severe consequences. The relationship is shadowed by unanswered questions about athletes who previously abandoned Mike, including his estranged son, portrayed by Drew Getchy. Some of this material could have been developed more fully; the insinuations surrounding Mike occasionally promise a darker story than the screenplay ultimately chooses to tell. Nevertheless, Mike Edward conveys enough regret and emotional isolation to prevent the character from becoming merely a predatory mentor. Attraction grows between the two men almost imperceptibly, emerging through physical proximity, private glances and the intimacy of training. In another film, their first kiss might have been staged as a sensational revelation. Here it feels like the temporary collapse of a wall both men have spent years reinforcing.

What makes Test particularly intelligent is its refusal to package Eddie’s sexuality into a neat declaration. His renewed connection with a former girlfriend, played with warmth and emotional precision by Paloma Garcia-Lee, is not dismissed as denial or treated as a convenient obstacle to his relationship with Mike. Eddie’s heartbreak over her departure for New York feels sincere, as does the desire that briefly returns between them. The film leaves room for uncertainty, understanding that identity is not always discovered in a single moment of revelation. Their ballet sessions are among its loveliest ideas. Aware that his competition posing is stiff, Eddie asks her to teach him how to move, and the hulking bodybuilder finds himself practicing gestures associated with delicacy and grace. It is not simply a joke built around physical contrast. He is learning that masculinity need not mean rigidity, and that control can come from fluidity rather than force. That lesson culminates in a posing routine set to “The Swan” from Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals, when the movements acquired in a modest dance studio are transformed into something unexpectedly majestic beneath the stage lights.

Cinematographer Ava Benjamin Shorr reinforces that transformation by contrasting the drained colors of Eddie’s daily existence with the glowing, oiled bronze of his body onstage. The competition scenes reveal bodybuilding as a peculiar meeting point between extreme masculinity and theatrical performance: every muscle must appear powerful, yet every movement has to look effortless. Test never mocks this world or presents its participants as grotesque curiosities. It respects the labor, sacrifice and artistry involved while remaining clear-eyed about the physical cost and the illusion of perfection. One especially sharp recurring detail is the electronic sound of tips arriving during Eddie’s cam performances. The cheerful pings turn exposure into a financial transaction, suggesting that even in supposed privacy he is still being judged, rewarded and scored. Onstage, online, at church and at home, Eddie is forever adapting himself to an audience. His greatest challenge is not building more muscle but imagining a life in which he no longer needs external approval to feel real.

Brock Yurich delivers a fearless performance, but its strength lies less in physical exposure than in emotional awkwardness. Eddie can fill a room with his body while appearing desperate to take up less space. He is affable, needy, stubborn and frightened, sometimes behaving cruelly when affection threatens to reveal too much about him. Sam McConnell generally trusts silence, allowing embarrassment and desire to linger rather than translating every feeling into dialogue. The film does become overly earnest in places, and at 114 minutes its final stretch occasionally labors points already made with greater subtlety. Comparisons with Elyjah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams are inevitable, although Test follows a more compassionate path. It is interested not in turning bodybuilding obsession into lurid psychosis but in finding the frightened human being concealed beneath cultivated mass. Its conclusion offers something resembling victory without pretending that a trophy can repair addiction, religious rejection, family dependency or years of self-denial. Sexy, melancholic and unusually tender, Test understands that physical strength and vulnerability are not opposites. Sometimes the most formidable body in the room belongs to the person least certain of his right to be there.

Test
Directed by Sam McConnell
Written by Brock Yurich
Produced by: Julie Christeas, Daryl Freimark, Matt Corrado, Brock Yurich
Starring: Brock Yurich, Tammy Blanchard, Mike Edward, Paloma Garcia-Lee, Evan Hall, Matthew Morrison, Heidi Lewandowski
Cinematography: Ava Benjamin Shorr
Edited by Jon Higgins
Music by: Not yet officially announced
Production companies: Tandem Pictures, Bridge Independent, Hardball Entertainment
Distributed by: Not yet announced
Release dates: NC
Running time: 113 minutes

Seen on 9 September 2026 at the Deauville International Center