In issuing his aggravated although implicit accusation about sexy and sex-obsessed films, director Spencer Schilly opens The Houseboy with a ménage à trois made deeply unsettling by a sense of a momentary pleasure's imminent decline. As troubled college drop-out Ricky (Nick May) snuggles between longtime couple Simon (Tom Merlino) and DJ (Brian Patacca), his innocent affection already appears a relic of a bygone golden age, a fact confirmed when Ricky overhears that he's soon to be kicked out of the threesome. Left alone during the winter holidays to watch over the pair's apartment as well as their innumerable pets and depressed about a dissociation with his mother, Ricky falls into a moral downward spiral of drug use, anonymous sex and attempted suicide. Abandoned by both his lovers and friends, he sees no object to his existence, and it's this lonely space that Schilly exploits to best effect in his mostly off-the-cuff feature.

Reacting to the distribution and exhibition disappointments with his previous film Send in the Clown, Schilly set out to craft a marketable picture that would simultaneously mock the commercial while playing to its audience-- hence several attractive, naked men performing X-rated sexual acts on one another. To compensate for the appeal of this, however, Schilly explores these spaces with a darkness and brutality, his character reacting dually with insensitivity and awkwardness. For all the physical one-on-one, or two and three, there's little emotional connection between characters in any of these scenes, the closest approximation a brief moment shared by Ricky and the aptly named Tweaker in Tub (David Beck). In an attempt to get hard again, high as he is, the scrawny stranger requests "Kiss me" and "Tell me that you love me." With great hesitation and some tenderness, Ricky complies. In stark contrast to these scenes of debauchery are those in which Ricky spends time with the boy-next-door figure Blake (Blake Young-Fountain). Declaring that he never kisses on the first date, Blake represents the enthusiasm and energy that Ricky has somehow, by a young age, already lost.

Shot quickly during winter 2007 in an Astoria apartment by Schilly as well as producer and director of photography Derek Curl,The Houseboy owes much of its strength to a lack of self-consciousness. With its fly-on-the-wall approach, the film draws sole attention to the characters, not ignoring but letting go artiness. For this reason, the acting, May and Young-Fountain's performances in particular, stand out for their focus and naturalism. Developed organically, their relationship suggests a real, vital and fully palpable attraction, this despite the missteps of some clunky and ineloquent dialogue.

For all its dark content, The Houseboy ends with an all too neatly wrapped up optimism, its messages of positivity imparted redundantly, and while refreshingly its message bestows a faith back in humanity, the film seems to suddenly shy from its harsher realities. It feels that while Schilly intended a playful subversion with The Houseboy, he could not but help ending in happiness, which, while not unexpected with the story, felt a bit forced and ultimately traditional.

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