Review: Cutaways (2025)

In Mark Schwab’s Cutaways, the indignities of artistic survival are staged as a dark comedy of professional exile. 

Evan Quick (Silas Kade), once an award-winning independent filmmaker celebrated on the festival circuit, finds himself on the wrong side of a social-media backlash. With his reputation in tatters and his finances deteriorating, he accepts an assignment that feels like an admission of defeat. Now, he is directing an online pornographic film for Sammy Slade (James Duval), a producer whose business instincts are matched by his appetite for manipulation. What follows is a day on a film set in which everyone seems to be negotiating the distance between ambition and humiliation.

Evan’s performers include Andy (Fernando), a former child actor with a blue-haired defiance and a precarious hold on relevance, and Ryan (Diogo Hausen), whose uncomplicated conviction that an opportunity to work in popular feature films awaits him makes him an easy target for the industry’s appetites. When Sammy turns up with his younger boyfriend, Trace (Jason Caceres), the brittle arrangements of authority begin to alter. An unforeseen misfortune threatens the production, forcing Evan to reconsider what he is prepared to sacrifice to keep working.

Schwab’s screenplay is most assured when it allows the absurdity of the situation to coexist with its underlying disappointments. The warehouse in which Schwab confines the action is more than a budget-conscious production choice. It functions as a confined zone, bringing together people whose aspirations have outlasted their professional prospects. The film’s humour emerges not merely from the incongruity of a once-celebrated auteur directing pornography, but from the familiar hierarchies that govern creative work like who gets to make decisions, whose labour is valued, and who can afford to refuse a bad deal. Andy and Evan, in particular, seem bound by a mutual recognition of obsolescence, their respective falls from grace exposing the precariousness of careers built on an industry’s fickle approval. Ryan’s faith in his own imminent success seems like a distant dream. His buoyancy reveals how easily the promise of opportunity can obscure the possibility of exploitation.

The film’s predominantly queer characters give these tensions an additional dimension without reducing its characters to their social identification. Their conflicts concern work, acceptance, autonomy, and the compromises required to remain visible. As the story unfolds, questions of creative intimacy and the unequal relationship between an artist and his subjects become increasingly difficult to separate from the more immediate struggle for control on set. The film’s title suggests the insert footage used in filmmaking, but Schwab is more interested in the people whose lives and labour are routinely treated as expendable in the service of someone else’s vision.

Cutaways occasionally feels constrained by its single location and compressed, day-long narrative. Yet that limitation serves its central argument that the film industry’s cold-heartedness is often most visible when there is nowhere left to retreat. Schwab finds jocularity and flashes of hope amid the degradation, even if the film’s ideas sometimes outstrip its dramatic scope. What emerges is a modest, sharply observed illustration of creative desperation, in which the desire to make art persists long after the industry has withdrawn its permission.