Dhamaka Arts

Departures presents itself as a queer film, but what it actually delivers is something far narrower. Beneath the label, it feels rooted in a familiar and well-worn perspective: a white, gay, male lens that has dominated this space for years.

That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the film acknowledged its specificity. Instead, it gestures toward universality, as though this singular viewpoint can stand in for the breadth of queer experience. It can’t. And in 2026, that gap feels glaring.

The storytelling doesn’t help its case. Key plot developments arrive with little grounding or emotional build. When we’re suddenly introduced to a girlfriend and the revelation of a child, it doesn’t land as complex or layered, just predictable. The film seems to expect these moments to carry weight on arrival, but without proper development, the stakes never feel high enough to matter.

At one point, I genuinely felt like I’d wandered into the wrong terminal. Not Departures as in emotional transition, but Departures as in completely removed from reality. The kind where you check the board, look around, and realise nothing here is landing where it says it will.

There’s an attempt at style, but it feels overstated without being distinctive. The humour doesn’t land, the shock value misfires, and what remains is something oddly flat. Not unfamiliar, just dated. The emotional beats, the character dynamics, even the way queerness is framed all echo an earlier era of storytelling that centred a narrow range of voices while presenting itself as representative.

And that becomes even clearer when placed alongside films like Moonlight or God’s Own Country, which understand how to build intimacy, tension, and stakes with care and specificity. Even The Pass, working within a similarly male, British context, manages to create urgency and emotional consequence in ways Departures never quite reaches.

As a result, the experience becomes detached. The only real engagement comes from laughing at the film rather than with it.

This isn’t a rejection of queer storytelling. It’s a call for it to be broader, more honest, and more reflective of the multiplicity that defines it. Queer cinema has moved forward. Departures feels like it hasn’t.

And while it may resonate with a specific audience, it ultimately feels like a film speaking to a narrow experience while claiming something much bigger.

What makes this particularly frustrating is how out of step it feels with where queer storytelling is right now, and where it needs to go next.

Through my work with Dhamaka Arts, I’m interested in queerness that doesn’t exist in isolation. Stories that hold culture, family, religion, race, and neurodivergence all at once. Stories that are messy, contradictory, specific, and alive. Not flattened into something easily digestible, and not framed through a single dominant lens.

Because queerness is not one story. It’s not one voice. It’s not one experience.

And that’s why films like Departures feel so limiting. Not just because of what they are, but because of what they choose not to be. In a moment where there is space for richer, more expansive storytelling, settling for something this narrow feels like a step backwards.

This review isn’t about tearing something down for the sake of it. It’s about asking for more. More risk. More specificity. More voices. More truth.

Because audiences are ready for it. And frankly, we deserve it.

If this is what gets called ‘queer cinema,’ then the work we’re making at Dhamaka Arts isn’t just important… it’s necessary.