It’s proving to be a great season for gay rom coms. I recently just raved about ‘The Thing About Harry,’ and now we have James Sweeney’s ‘Straight Up.’ But wait, this film isn’t really your ‘traditional’ rom com. Well, it doesn’t seem to be traditional anything. It is about Todd (played by Sweeney himself) who is probably gay, but more than that, has neurotic traits that prove to be very funny only in films. He is longing for someone – anyone – and in his scientific mind, he thinks he should date women, much to the aghast of his friends (‘You’re a Kinsey five, four maybe if you are not wearing cashmere’)  Then he meets Rory (Katie Findlay) and they are soul mates in every single way, except for one thing: sex. But really, we don’t really need that anymore in this day and age, right?

We will all have thoughts and theories about this and the film will make you agree, disagree, and question everything you have ever believed in love. And it’s all the wonderful for it.  Sweeney and Findlay have chemistry for days, and Sweeney’s screenplay is so exhilarating that you will believe – even root – for them as they try as hell to make it all work. You will go against what you believe in in wanting something that is surely improbably, and probably impossible. I could definitely identify with these characters – surely we have all been there before, in the middle of something deep in our hearts we feel is wrong, but something about it feels so right. there was a point there towards the end when I thought it was going to a place it didn’t want to go. At another point, I thought I had figured out where it would, but in landed somewhere a little unexpected for me – the movie always kept me on my toes. Above all, these characters touched my heart. I felt like I knew them, and didn’t want to part with them. Yeah, for about one hundred minutes, I felt like I was in love, and thank you very much for that.