Sick Sex

"Blow on it. How does it taste? Try, baby. Open up."

Both the title and the opening lines (delivered by an as yet unseen male) of Justin Nowell's Sick Sex may raise suspicions that a snatch of hardcore porn has somehow snaked its way into the festival circuit – but then this wry 12-minute short builds itself around a slippery open-endedness in the discourses of illness and eroticism, as sexual opportunity is seen in the most unlikely of contexts.

The speaker is Ken (Ken Forman) and he is trying to administer a few spoonfuls of soup to his bed-ridden, febrile girlfriend Amanda (Amanda Gruss), although it will soon emerge that tender loving care of an altogether different sort is on Ken's mind as he tries to convince Amanda of the therapeutic benefits of some “hot” sex. Unsurprisingly, Amanda feels up for little more than a quiet read and some sleep, but Ken is persistent, transparently deploying his entire arsenal of emotional blackmail with hilarious charmlessness ("Is it so fuckin' horrible to just lie there?", etc.), until Amanda at last exposes Ken's own sickness.

Shot on HD in a claustrophobic Manhattan apartment over a single sweltering afternoon, Sick Sex positively drips with overflowing (if decidedly one-sided) desire, as male libido shows a crass indifference to female needs. Nowell's economic screenplay (co-written with his brother Tommy) will have any heterosexual couple cringing with familiarity. Forman and Gruss convey perfectly the way in which a single disagreement between partners can unearth a whole history of tensions – and the unlikely phrase, "a thermos full of warm oysters," used to describe the supposedly attractive qualities of a feverish vagina, may just give rise to a whole new sexual fetish.