Movie Review: 'Mope' is a True Crime Story in the World of Low Rent Porn

Mope is an exceedingly unpleasant pseudo-comedy-drama about the lowest depths of the porn business. Co-written and directed by Lucas Heyne, Mope opens on a porn set with a group of terrifyingly misshapen and desperate men performing an unspeakable act on a willing female porn star. She wants this thing to happen, apparently, but that does not alleviate the horror of this graphic scene, a jarring introduction to this story and to our main characters.

Mope intends to shock audiences and while I am not a prude this movie definitely found my limit and it did so in the opening scene. In this stomach turning moment, we meet Steve (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) and Tom (Kelly Sry), our protagonists. Steve is… having difficulty performing and Tom talks him through the issues and Steve is able to… finish. This creates the basis for their friendship.

Tom is eager to please, a doormat who is so desperate for a supportive friend that he willingly latches on to Steve, a man who demonstrates very quickly why he has no friends to begin with. One of those reasons Steve is alone until he meets Tom is that he never showers. The movie makes a big point of Steve’s lack of hygiene but fails to explain why Steve struggles with this aspect of his life, one that everyone is eager to humiliate him over.

Being smelly is just of the awkward and off-putting foibles of Steve. Others include screaming ‘Driven’ as he finishes sex or his ludicrous level of intensity as he performs. These quirks, for lack of a better word, feel as if they are intended to be funny but Nathan Stewart-Jarrett never plays these characteristics for laughs. In Stewart Jarrett’s hands these foibles are less comic over-statements and more representative of deep psychological wounds that Steve is barely able to suppress as he goes from one day to the next.

As we go along, Tom reveals that he gave up a high paying job in I.T to chase his dream of working in the adult film business. Steve, on the other hand, has left behind a history of odd behavior, and a deeply disappointed and embarrassed father, to chase that same dream. Tom and Steve have become friends at just the right moment in order to feed each other's delusions about their career path.

Via their opening job, which I cannot describe in this space, Tom and Steve meet a producer named Eric (Brian Huskey) who agrees to hire them. This job only comes after Tom promises to help with Eric’s website and the two are paid half what Tom would get on his own. Tom agrees and the two join a stable of oddly shaped men at the very bottom of the ladder of the adult film industry. Their first big job? Stripping down to be kicked in the crotch for a very specific fetish with a very on the nose name that you can figure out for yourself.

From there, Steve and Tom begin to work in the most degrading of filth while also serving as part time janitors and getting paid a pittance. The horrors that Steve and Tom willingly observe and take part in are not for the squeamish or anyone interested in being entertained while watching a movie. As I mentioned, Mope is an unsettling, unfunny and unpleasant experience. The filmmakers are aiming for edgy and outlandish but they land somewhere closer to unwatchable.

Mope is a dreary film experience lacking in visual imagination and languishing in an ugly mood that wants to be Todd Solondz crossed with Boogie Nights, but lacks the ambition and expertise to approach such lofty notions. Instead, we get something closer to a slacker sex comedy stuffed into a blender with a low rent horror movie. You can sense the ambition and the intent to push boundaries but what point is the movie intending to make?

Mope isn't particularly critical of the kinds of depravity that Steve and Tom engage in. There is a subplot about race in the movie, involving a character played by David Arquette, but the scene is too muddled. It's unclear if Arquette's racist porno director is supposed to funny or if we are supposed to feel for our pathetic, scheming protagonists as Arquette berates them. Steve's idea of 'improv' during a scene certainly seems intended as humor but the joke did not land for me and the scene almost makes Arquette's character appear sympathetic. That's how tone deaf much of Mope is.

Is Mope about the empty pursuit of empty pleasure? Is Mope simply a true crime story? The movie is based on a true story of low rent porn stars who found tragedy instead of stardom. But the creators of Mope fail to establish either a tone of dark comedy, tragedy or even minor psychodrama. You can sense that Mope was intended to be all of those things but ends up somewhere sloppily wallowing in ugliness and bile.

Mope is available for most streaming services as of June 16th, 2020.