Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #257: Goat (2016).

 

In this adaptation of Brad Land's memoir, 19-year-old Brad (Ben Schnetzer) enrols in a college to straighten his life out after a vicious summer assault. His elder brother Brett (Nick Jonas) is already a well-established sophomore and tells Brad about his fraternity, which lures the desperate-to-belong Brad in with promises of acceptance, protection and friendship. But of course, not much sooner than Brad signs his membership form does he see what it actually delivers for its members: a toxic initiation process involving numerous public and increasingly dangerous, compromising hazing rituals and stunts. It's absolutely not like campfires at Scout camps. As the process progresses, Brad becomes ever more reluctant, trepidatious and disillusioned about the fraternity, with his and Brett's relationship deteriorating as a result and the fraternity having to face consequences of its own.

Goat is another movie I don't quite know how I feel about, but I do know it proved quite thought-provoking for me and not only because of its content. To my knowledge fraternities and sororities don't exist in Australian tertiary education institutions (my alma mater certainly lacks them) although the extracurricular cultures of ours have similar drawbacks, and so it offered me quite a more unflinching peek into their damaging activities and policies than I've seen before, as opposed to the ones in US TV teen dramas and certain other films. However, while I was engaged and concerned throughout, it didn't move me as perhaps it was meant to. Andrew Neel's direction feels emotionally detached at times, although he cleverly avoided any unconventional visual touches to reflect how these fraternities and sororities are frequently more conservative and exclusive than they claim to be, and the script he co-wrote with David Gordon Green and Mike Roberts maintains a natural and frank dialogue tone and plots the central character arcs lucidly. Schnetzer fills Brad's shoes convincingly in a smartly understated turn and Jake Picking brings sincerity to the antagonistic fraternity leader Dixon, although Jonas tries just a tad too hard as Brett. Goat has its issues, but it's definitely stimulating and I think the point is this: hazing in fraternities and sororities causes great damage, but you can survive it and Brad Land is among the lucky ones who did.