Goat

As an outsider, I have always thought that college fraternities (and sororities) were mainly a way for affluent parents to network their children into social organizations to eventually gain positions of influence in order to screw over everyone lower on the food chain. Maybe it's because, from Revenge of the Nerds to Neighbors, that's what cinema has taught us. Fraternities are the bad guys, the easy foil of college comedies, a boilerplate “us vs. them” dichotomy. Whether you're an alum or not, Andrew Neel's Goat doesn't really have anything new to say about that, especially if you have been on the internet for, say, the past 20 years, reading the increasingly horrific accounts of crimes on America's campuses. But Neel's film, which is based on Brad Land's 2004 memoir about his experiences in the mid-Nineties, dials in on a specific experience: a damaged man who submits to further emasculation in an effort to prove to himself that he is a man.

The film opens with Brad (Schnetzer) leaving a party at his younger brother Brett's (Jonas) fraternity. Naive and stupid, he offers a couple of guys a ride home and ends up in the middle of nowhere, car stolen, and beaten to a bloody pulp. Traumatized by the ordeal, he nevertheless enrolls in college the following fall, and pledges at Brett's fraternity. What follows is the usual progression of humiliation and degradation that – unless you're a time traveler from, say, Victorian London (or my grandmother) – is not surprising, or shocking, at all. Physical torture, shame, random degradation: All of these things have been documented over the years as the deaths by hazing have become more prominent. Neel's film dramatizes Brad's experience in a way that puts him in a place that is even more emotionally precarious, someone already triggered to respond poorly to the alpha-male bullying, and that feels like a front-loaded cop-out, even though it's based on actual events. Goat is scripted by Neel, Mike Roberts, and David Gordon Green (who has a winning track record for eviscerating the modern male – Eastbound and Down, Vice Principals particularly). The film is another near-miss talking point in an endless deluge of reminders that this system creates a breeding ground for toxic masculinity.