Heavy Petting

Heavy Petting explores the distinction and degeneration between loneliness and desolation through a bifurcated character study. It tells the story of two women that seem initially to be sharing a symbiotic longing for companionship, but who upon closer examination are experiencing something separate and gravely dissimilar.

Although longing is a natural feature of the human spirit, as someone who has descended into the aberrant solitude of mental illness, I know that it’s vital to develop an understanding of the difference between these two experiences, and how easily it is to slip from one to the other without support.

Using a gradual tonal shift, the film aims to lull an audience into the expectation of an off-beat erotic journey, before pivoting at the midpoint and thrusting them into a bleaker world, with subtle callbacks that reconfigure their understanding of what came earlier to create a stark compare and contrast experience.

Heavy Petting is a film for people who feel invisible or disposable, and have been driven to despair because of it. It is primarily for young adults, whose experiences of alienation are especially acute, and especially for queer folks who know the sting of fetishization better than most. It is particularly for bisexual identifying people, whose suffering often goes unnoticed or is dismissed entirely.

The morbidity and creeping horror of Heavy Petting is a way to express that the stakes are higher than people think. Although mental health issues may initially present as modest, and be disregarded as frivolous, they are an insidious force that needed to be confronted. I hope that the revulsion of the film’s conclusion will shock people out of complacency, and inspire empathy and intervention in the lives of folks yearning to have their pain acknowledged.