Hot Docs 2021 | "Lost Boys"; A Jilted, Nocturnal Descent of Horrifying Discovery
8/12 ForReel Score | 3.5/5 Stars
“Other side of the tracks
Scuzz outsiders
Nothin’ to lose
Strike of midnighters”
A film like this feels like it should exist only on an unmarked VHS tape in the basement of an abandoned house. Joonas Neuvonen’s Lost Boys, a follow-up to his 2010 documentary Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland, is a descent into the nightmare of a jilted existence; a hedonistic plunge into a narcotic-laced netherworld and the nether regions of the fraying psyche. To watch it is to feel as if you yourself have wandered and gone astray, tumbled down a dark region of no return. It is to feel as if you need to gasp for light.
Neuvonen, whose story is narrated by the gravely voiced Pekka Strang, compiles together cellphone videos, hidden camera footage, and impressionistic shallow depth of field close-ups to tell the neon-tinged story of his search for his two friends, Jani and Antti, who have strayed from moralistic society and gone AWOL in Cambodia to pursue excesses of drugs and sex. Jani was Neuvonen’s subject before in the earlier Reindeerspotting, which followed Jani’s exploits in opiod drug use and petty burglary as his means of escaping the oppressive cold and mundanity of Rovaniemi, Finland. Now, in Lost Boys, Jani has taken his bacchanal to Southeast Asia but has wound up dead after pushing his limits too far. Neuvonen’s documentary thus becomes a means of revisiting and reflecting on the dark, sorted corners his friends once used to tread, and an attempt to sift through the detritus of distorted memories and morbid footage to uncover some sense of “truth” or sense behind his passing.
Neuvonen’s resulting odyssey is a somewhat noir-ish investigation, taking place almost exclusively at night as he seeks out old haunts and the nocturnal creatures who may have had some contact with his late friend. Claims that this film uses a xenophobic lens in order to turn the Southeast Asian cities depicted into hellish underworlds certainly aren’t unfounded, but Neuvonen makes it clear in the film’s opening that in returning to the cities, he was met with a unsettling feeling that everything felt “completely different.” The cities of Bangkok and Phnom Penh thus take on an oppressive and claustrophobic air of menace in Lost Boys because they are what mask the details of the narrator’s friend’s disappearance and death. They distort themselves into the shadowy zones of mystery and dread.
What serves the intended atmosphere, though, also veers into exploitative territory blatantly enough to put you off the trip altogether. Drug use depicted in documentaries, even if done by adults who have consented to being filmed, always draws into question a subject’s continued willingness to being filmed (!needle use warning!). When it incorporates un-censored participation from individuals who aren’t the film’s subjects, and when it is clear that this footage was shot under a casual pre-tense where “documentary” never entered the conversation, then the film’s morals become even murkier. Lost Boys also features a few brief scenes of un-simulated sex (!erect penis warning!), which are not only really jarring, but also potentially deplorable, since they too seem to have been sourced without consent.
Without question, there is more than enough that is “gross” in Lost Boys to convince you that this is a film deserving of that untouched, dusty spot in the basement. But if something inside you compels you down those creaky stairs—maybe a darkness in your heart you feel a need to explore—then Lost Boys may actually reveal itself to you as a profound meditation on the harrowing points of no return and the rifts in matter that these points can open up in the chasms of one’s mind.
Like narrative films such as Enter the Void, Victoria, and Requiem for a Dream, Neuvonen’s Lost Boys proves adept at synthesizing the “caving in” feeling one is in peril of when crippling addiction and an insatiable want to push further sends your life careening. In the case of Lost Boys, though, the lives we observe to be in peril are real lives, one of which having since been lost. This is the truth to Jani’s story that we know, but a truth the director himself is unable to accept on its own. But by investigating further truths, Lost Boys seems to suggest that Neuvonen pens a narrative not unlike those found in films like Enter the Void or Victoria – films with stories abstracted by psychedelic strands of twisted perception and fractured shards of memory. The result: he is left straddling the black gulf that opens up between the worlds of non-fiction and fiction when substances disturb the frames. There are glimmering objects in this void worth exploring, but you will have to consider what this will cost you.
“Lost boys, lost boys
Lost boys, lost boys
Lost boys, lost boys
It’s such a long way down”
