Jim Queen review: a gloriously filthy gay satire with claws

Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athané weaponise camp against the toxic hierarchies of gay male culture

Jim Queen arrives like a glitter bomb thrown into a gay club bathroom: loud, vulgar, chaotic, suspiciously sticky, and far sharper than it first appears. I knew within minutes that this was either going to be unbearable or exactly my kind of stupid. By the end, it had somehow become both, which is meant as praise. Directed by Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athané, this French adult animated feature takes aim at the gay community with such speed and shamelessness that half the fun comes from waiting to see which line it will cross next. The answer, almost always, is all of them.

It is also hard to watch Jim Queen without thinking about how rare this kind of thing still is. Adult animation has long had room for dysfunctional families, alcoholic horses, horny spies and endless variations on the straight male slob. Explicitly gay adult animation, especially one this committed to skewering gay culture from within, remains far thinner on the ground. Netflix's short-lived Q-Force briefly tried to occupy that space. Jim Queen is nastier, sharper and much more willing to bite the hand that moisturises it.

At its centre is Jim Perfect, a gym-obsessed influencer with two million followers, eleven-pack abs and a soul that has been permanently replaced by self-promotion. Jim is not merely vain. He is vanity given human form, a walking torso willing to sacrifice anyone if it gets him closer to the podium at PowerBoyz, the gay club where social worth seems to be measured in muscle definition, sexual currency and public adoration.

Then Paris is hit by heterosis, a mysterious disease that causes gay men to become straight in stages. The symptoms are both absurd and merciless: loss of body perfection, fashion disasters, manspreading, an interest in football, a desire for monogamy, an urge to have children and, finally, the loss of attraction to men. When one of Jim's eleven abs retracts, the crisis is not medical but existential. For him, heterosexuality is horrifying, but becoming ordinary may be worse.

Opposite Jim is Lucien, a 23-year-old twink and devoted fan who is still closeted at home. His mother, Christine Bayer, is the right-wing health minister, a woman who theatrically collapses into emotional ruin every time he comes close to telling her the truth. Lucien's closet is less a metaphor than a full architectural joke: a vast walk-in rotunda packed with dildos, posters of Jim Perfect and every sign of a life he cannot yet claim in public.

When Lucien sneaks into PowerBoyz, the film gives him the energy of someone entering gay mythology for the first time. I half expected Troye Sivan's "Bite" to start playing. Instead, he and Jim are thrown into a frantic hunt for a disgraced doctor who may have a cure for heterosis. The price, naturally, is morally steep. Jim, naturally, is not above paying it.

From there, Jim Queen becomes an odyssey through a feverishly satirised gay Paris. There is a bear bar where bears are literal bears. There is Jim's ex, Robear, a former gym queen turned bear, because of course his name is Robear. There is Michèle the Scally, whose footwear fetish becomes one of the film's many jokes that somehow starts stupid and ends precise. There is also Gaystapo, a BDSM counter-movement fighting heterosis by locking "heteroised" former gay men in rainbow-coloured sarcophagi filled with dildos.

That last gag made me laugh, then wince, then immediately wonder whether laughing was the right response. That is usually where Jim Queen is at its best. Beneath the camp excess is a real anger at the systems that have shaped queer life from the outside, and the ugly hierarchies gay men have built inside it. The film mocks body fascism, desirability politics, femmephobia, masc obsession, internalised shame and the exhausting taxonomy of gay identity. But it also understands that these flaws did not form in a vacuum. The joke is never just "gay men are awful." It is that gay men, having survived centuries of shame, policing and conversion fantasies, have sometimes recreated smaller versions of those same prisons for each other.

That is where the film hit me hardest. Its world is intensely codified: twinks, bears, gym queens, drag queens, scally boys, cruising grounds, clubs, fetishes, chosen families and brutal hierarchies of beauty all collide in one ridiculous ecosystem. It is funny because it is exaggerated, but also because it is not exaggerated enough. Drag queens appear as fairy godmothers, including one named Glamydia. Gaydar becomes an almost elemental superpower, able to calculate queerness in percentage points. The prostate is treated like a deity. Trojan Unicorns appear, because the film cannot resist a pun and usually should not.

The animation leans into the bright, elastic energy of early-2000s spy cartoons, at times recalling the sleek pop silliness of Totally Spies! but filtered through a far filthier queer imagination. The musical numbers are boppy, the character designs are deliciously exaggerated, and the rhythm rarely slows down long enough for a joke to die politely. Some will find it too much. They will not be entirely wrong. I occasionally did too. The satire is on steroids, much like several of its characters, and the film sometimes piles punchlines on top of punchlines when one clean hit would have landed harder.

Still, excess is part of its method. Jim Queen does not want to be tasteful. It wants to be rude, horny, wounded and funny. It wants to make you laugh, then make you wince because the joke has found something true. Its plot is more conventional than its surface suggests, but the pleasure lies in the detours, the visual gags and the escalating sense that whenever you think, "surely they won't go there," they absolutely will.

For a film so proudly unserious, Jim Queen has a surprisingly sharp sense of what gay culture gives people and what it takes from them. It is a satire with claws, abs and a deeply diseased heart. I mean that as a compliment.

Directors: Marco Nguyen, Nicolas Athané

Writers: Marco Nguyen, Nicolas Athané

Cast: Alex Ramirès (Jim Parfait), Jérémy Gillet (Lucien), Shirley Souagnon (Nina), François Sagat (Pavel), Harald Marlot (Glamydia), Elisabeth Wiener (Christine), Alex Brik, Philippe Katerine

Running time: 85 minutes

Rating: 5/5