Castration Movie Chapter iii.ii Junior Ghosts – Premorphic Drift: Louise Weard has created a new trans cinematic language

Where to start with Castration Movie? Whenever I write about Louise Weard’s DIY film series, I find myself spiralling. Perhaps that’s the only appropriate response to a project like this, a labyrinthine multi-chapter epic, currently running at 11-plus hours (including intermissions), which takes as its dominant themes radicalisation, social dysfunction, and alienation. 

Directed by and starring Weard, Castration Movie is lo-fi and semi-improvised, shot on a Hi8 camcorder. Each chapter in the ongoing narrative tells a different story, but these vignettes are connected by interrelated preoccupations – gender, violence, the internet – and recurring characters, often played by Weard’s friends from Vancouver and New York’s queer art scenes. Weard has created a cinematic extended universe, a parallel world in which artists, incels, sex workers and cult leaders collide in genre-hopping exchanges that range from cringe comedy to social satire to full-on horror-movie nightmare.

The next official instalment is due in 2027, but in the meantime Weard has produced an interstitial standalone feature. Junior Ghosts – Premorphic Drift is a self-contained story focusing on a couple, Izzy (Avalon Fast) and Trent (Henry Gillespi), who appeared in the first movie, Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps (2024). Izzy works remotely for a helpline, fielding agonising calls about gendered violence from her living room, while the unemployed, directionless Trent hangs around. When Trent comes out as transgender, asking to be called Tiffany, Izzy is blindsided. As Tiffany embraces her evolving identity, Izzy’s resentment curdles into anger.

Characteristically for a Weard film, Premorphic Drift is hypnotically slow. Izzy and Tiffany’s disintegration unfolds over extended scenes shot with a single camera, which roams around the characters’ faces as they argue and commiserate. The effect is disorientating but absorbing, aesthetically echoing the looping misunderstandings of real life. Izzy’s transphobic awakening is shocking because it arrives gradually, a drip-by-toxic-drip radicalisation fed by online discourse and miscommunication. 

Like the internet forums which feature in her films, Weard’s world has its own codes and conventions. Although this is a standalone story, seasoned ‘Weardos’ will enjoy callbacks to previous chapters, including therapy scenes centred on the fabulously sociopathic Michaela (Weard). This metatextuality could be construed as cliquey, but for all its postmodern references and edgelord provocations, Weard’s fundamentally humanist approach rewards commitment.

Like her peers in the current exhilarating queer filmmaking wave, such as Vera Drew and Jane Schoenbrun (who both appear in cameos and as producers across the Castration series), Weard is writing a new trans cinematic language, distinct from the flattening mainstream. Such an approach is never going to be for everyone — that’s the point. If Castration Movie is for you however, then strap yourself in; you’re about to become obsessed.

► Castration Movie Chapter iii.ii Junior Ghosts – Premorphic Drift is in UK cinemas now.