Review: A painful, provocative reunion demands your empathy in the daring 'Blue Film'

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To describe a movie as including a ski mask, a camcorder and $50,000 in cash would certainly lead one to imagine a specific type of story.Add two men and sex work and the brain might roll around more pointed scenarios.But none of that can prepare you for what micro-indie “Blue Film” has in store.

The nexus of perversion, pain and sexual purpose driving writer-director Elliot Tuttle’s dark, discursive chamber drama is of a stripe rarely attempted in even the most self-consciously daring movies.Should you need a self-imposed break afterward from intimate two-handers, even Tuttle might understand, then wink in the general direction of his Pasolini posters.

(I’m guessing at this provocateur’s wall art.)Is it clear yet that “Blue Film,” set primarily in a house in Los Angeles over the course of a revelatory night, isn’t for everybody? Some of that “everybody,” incidentally, includes the festivals and distributors who rejected the queer filmmaker’s debut feature, despite having critical buzz, Tony-winning actor Reed Birney as one of its stars and indie guru Mark Duplass as a mentoring producer.But certain subjects (spoilers ahead) are bound to trigger a different kind of scrutiny.Initially, our attention is on macho-posturing tattooed camboy Aaron (“Boots” star Kieron Moore), graphically boasting to his followers online of the big payday he’ll receive that evening from a submissive client.

What he later encounters, however, at the door of a Craftsman on a quiet street is a masked, polite, older host (Birney) with a camera and, once it’s turned on, a lot of personal questions, the kind that begin to crack the facade of a young man used to being in control of his transactional life.Movies We’ve mapped out 27 of the best movie theaters in L.A., from the TCL Chinese and the New Beverly to the Alamo Drafthouse and which AMC reigns in Burbank.Then his clie...