Brooklyn Horror Film Fest 2024: Custom

The sexy, gritty, and harrowing psychological horror thriller “Custom” attempts—and achieves—much in its brief but riveting runtime.

Before the North American premiere of Custom at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, writer and director Tiago Teixeira told the audience that there were multiple interpretations of his first feature film. He wasn’t kidding.

This eerie and erotic film is a kaleidoscope that contains a body horror movie, an addiction story, a religious drama, a cautionary tale about consent, and a twisted love letter to the art of film itself.

Custom begins with attractive artsy couple Harriet (Abigail Hardingham) and Jasper (Rowan Polonski) on a livestream, looking very much in love. The two explain that there isn’t much money to be found in photography and video art, thus their side hustle as sex workers performing online. They even accept commissions and act out the fantasies of their top-paying clients.

Early in the film, Bishop (Brad Moore), the couple’s seedy connection to their mysterious clients, walks Jasper through his mini-gallery of doomed saints, including Saint Lucy, whose eyes were removed, and Saint Agatha, whose breasts were cut off. Bishop snickers and tells Jasper, “These were the original perverts – they paved the way for us.”

The epically sacrilegious mashup of religious devotion and pornography sets the intensity level for what’s next to come for Jasper and Harriet.

When a mysterious client requests to film themselves doing a prerecorded chant, Flower and Snake are suspicious of the assignment’s strangeness, but the money is lucrative. The only catch is that they must record themselves on VHS tapes and are instructed never to watch them themselves.

Naturally, temptation gets the better of them, and they discover themselves doing things on the tapes that they have no recollection of. As soon as they watch the first forbidden tape, life changes for Harriet and Jasper.

There are shades of Ivan Zulueta’s iconic Spanish art house film Arrebato (or in English: Rapture), which also interweaves the importance of film in artists’ lives with the self-destruction of drugs. Like the enraptured film director in Arrebato, Harriet and Jasper soon become addicted to watching the VHS tapes, especially when the footage is disturbing.

After learning what happens to her body on one of the tapes, Harriet’s tough mask slips for the first time in the film.

What’s so notable about CUSTOM isn’t the plot, which seems to exist almost as an afterthought, but the haunting visuals and sounds that accompany the couple’s journey into madness.

While they (especially Jasper) do make attempts to solve the mystery of who’s behind the strange requests, this intrigue is not what draws in viewers.

There is a level of sensory detail – from Harriet and Jasper’s realistically messy love nest, with drugs scattered around, to the texture of the VHS tapes they use.

Philipp Morozov’s cinematography pairs with Teixeira’s direction to place viewers squarely inside the couple’s lives. Sam Mason’s sound design also works to make the film as gritty and realistic as possible. The audience hears every hiss and crackle of the VHS tapes, just as Jasper and Harriet hear them.

In addition to the different themes and interpretations at play in Teixeira’s work, the film has a found-footage quality at times. It is not always clear who is filming Harriet and Jasper, which makes much of what the audience sees even more unsettling.

Custom will take viewers on a frightening journey that they won’t be able to erase from their memory.