Writer/director Andrew Thomas Huang’s gorgeous and sexy short felt like a lost scene from the first season of American Gods and it manages to do several things at once:
- Create two well-realized, exquisitely art-directed settings ? one more or less realist, one mythopoeic ? and synthesize them into an organic whole, one that feels like a lived-in if fantastic world.
- Depict believably, however briefly, the bustling working life of a closeted gay man in a Chinese restaurant, edited in near-Vertovian conjunctive patterns.
- Fold tenderness and ritualistic blood-eroticism into hot, same-sexed, Asian-male encounters.
Fresh and unexpected, this short prompted me to seek out Huang’s music videos which also use digital imagery in beautiful, surprising, and surprisingly grounded ways.
Huang’s music videos are great but Kiss of the Rabbit God is an even more exciting short-film debut.