‘Dirty Boy’ Review: A Fascinating Look At Mental Health And Cults [Raindance 2025]
Premiering at Raindance, Doug Rao’s debut feature film opens on the titular Dirty Boy, Isaac (Stan Steinbichler), finding himself locked in his room with drug-induced amnesia. There, he must rediscover his name and why he’s being kept prisoner. But Isaac is never truly alone, because the paranoid schizophrenic has the voices in his head to keep him company. When he does escape from his bedroom with the help of fellow cult member Hope (Honor Gillies), Isaac stumbles upon a bloody sacrifice that was not meant for his eyes and realizes he can’t escape the cult he’s grown up in without first taking them down.
Isaac has gone his whole life believing he was the mad one, the dirty one in the clean, pious household. But after uncovering the cult’s bloody secret, he begins to question his own diagnosis and his upbringing. When Dirty Boy hones in on the strange religious cult, led by Walter (Graham McTavish) and Verity (Susie Porter), —who’ve adopted green juice as a daily tincture and apple cider vinegar as a cruel punishment—it succeeds in creating a distinctly creepy community even if it contains mostly borrowed ideas. Its most original concept, if an overt one, is making a conscious link between online wellness trends and rising fascism. But besides this and some well-constructed animal masks, the cult of Dirty Boy, despite being outlandish, does not stand out in the ever-expanding world of cult horror.
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Set in the isolated Alpine resort with minimal technological interference, it’s strange, then, that a key feature of Dirty Boy is a device somewhere between a smartphone and a Poké Ball. Isaac uses this round tech gadget on multiple occasions to gather intel on the cult and even to divert their sacrificial rituals by sending a message to cult leader Walter. It’s an unnecessary inclusion that only adds another confused layer to a plot already convoluted enough as Isaac untangles the threads of his own mental health, biological family, the cult’s secrets, and its patronage.
By Isaac’s third escape attempt and discovery, despite his ongoing inner monologue, what should be a neat revenge narrative gets tied up in tangential knots. Plus, it all culminates in a standoff between Isaac and Walt that leaves much of the narrative on an unsatisfactory note.
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Although the narrative becomes jumbled, Doug Rao’s debut truly shines in its crudely humorous script. It’s best delivered by Isaac, with his slew of outrageous one-liners, and the cult’s mother, Verity. Susie Porter revels in the vulgar language she repeats from Isaac even as she mimics disgust. Stan Steinbichler undoubtedly casts a similar shadow to the late great Anthony Perkins and yet Doug Rao’s script and his lead actor don’t attempt to bring Norman Bates back from the dead. Instead, everything Perkins kept just below the surface of his performance, Steinbichler projects, offering an outlandish depiction of schizophrenia, riffing on Hollywood’s psychotic cliche.
Dirty Boy is a vessel for Doug Rao’s sick sense of humor. In its loud, brash, and purposefully obnoxious depictions of mental health, the film laughs in the face of horror’s dearth of mental health metaphors.
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Dirty Boy
Summary
In its loud, brash, and purposefully obnoxious depictions of mental health, ‘Dirty Boy’ laughs in the face of horror’s dearth of mental health metaphors.
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