There are titles you immediately want to hide in the pocket of your coat, like a bar receipt: awkward to show, but throwing it away would mean lying about the night. The Masturbator’s Heart is exactly that kind of case. It sounds like a provocation, and then it suddenly turns out that what it provokes is not the audience, but you — into honesty. Into not hiding behind “a timely subject,” “teenage depression,” “the influence of the internet,” and all those other airbag-phrases. And that “bar receipt” you want to hide — it always comes from somewhere: it has a place, an evening, a cash register, a bartender with a strange look in his eyes. The Masturbator’s Heart has its own place of origin too — small, almost underground. It is called Kiddiepunk.
Kiddiepunk is not exactly a “publishing house” in the usual sense, but rather a small machine for producing vulnerability: they print, shoot, and release things as if they needed neither permission to exist nor the comfort of the reader or viewer. And Michael Salerno’s film is made according to that same logic: without the grand gesture, without a life raft, without the moral conclusion that “in the end we all understood something.” There is a teenager, there is a screen, there is a game of fifty tasks, and there is the strange, almost domestic persistence of death, which does not look like tragedy but like a schedule.
The main trap here is that Salerno demonstratively turns off the mode of anticipated compassion. The film does not ingratiate itself, does not trade in trauma, does not try to squeeze a modest tear out of you on behalf of a “lost generation.” It is a dry, almost dissecting test of your ability to register another person’s disintegration once all the usual humanist crutches and staged emotional crescendos have been taken away. To love, in this case, means to grant another person the right to self-destruction without your routine sympathy. It is not a sentimental impulse, but a willingness to keep looking at someone else’s catastrophe. Simply to look at a catastrophe that, in principle, has no need for your emotional evaluation.
Although “catastrophe” is too bulky a word for Salerno, too reminiscent of cheap staging. In his optics, death has been stripped of any metaphysical weight; it is not a tragic ending, but rather a final reconciliation of accounts, the routine reduction of a system to a common denominator. It is not “terrifying,” it is “logical”: a kind of medicine against everything excessive, a return to sterile neutrality, to absolute zero.
At the centre is a nameless, long-haired teenager played by Ange Dargent. He seems always to stand slightly aside: he does not fall out of the frame, but he never quite becomes part of it either. He methodically follows the rules of an online game: fifty tasks over fifty days. What at first seems like an almost absurd domestic whim quickly mutates into a destructive algorithm aimed at the only logical finale — the final “task.” But on the way there, the protagonist does something far more radical than an ordinary suicidal gesture: he annihilates the very fact of his own presence in the world. Objects, images, digital traces — Salerno records not simply the death of a body, but the total erasure of identity as a record, after which there should remain only an ideally clean, uncompromised emptiness.
Compositionally, the film is built as a series of studies in loneliness. The four-by-three format compresses the space, and most often we see the protagonist alone in the house. The interior looks almost caricaturally “respectable”: patterned wallpaper, wooden furniture — a shell of propriety that in no way corresponds to what is happening inside. And even among people he still seems to be somewhere off to the side: in class, his desk is pushed into the far corner; in one of the first scenes, the camera slowly moves towards his face while he looks at a classmate and meets not a person’s gaze, but a faceless back. This is not a story about how he “tries to make contact and fails.” There is no contact here. He is alone from the very beginning. This is not where the story “arrives”; this is where it starts. Against that background, death becomes not a dramatic turn, but the only exit left in the available menu.
And then everything folds into a repeating sequence. Salerno literally makes him walk backwards: in several scenes, he really does retreat, physically moving back-first. This reverse motion is not a beautiful device; it is simply how he lives: backwards, so as not to look reality in the face. Salerno merely staples this retreat to the file: login, shower, cold pizza, and ritual autoeroticism — without passion, but capable of filling the void.
What matters is that the director does not slip into moralising and does not try to “expose” the internet; he records an everyday life in which the interface has long since replaced the nervous system. The fifty-day quest is not a plot trick, but the only way to legalise one’s own presence: a day counts only if it has been properly documented. Moving backwards removes the need to choose or to want; one can simply do what has to be done, step by step. That is why the lo-fi image and the archaic online world do not work as nostalgia, but as diagnosis: we are locked in the basement of a present that has hopelessly “frozen,” and it is precisely in this shabbiness that the frightening resemblance to reality lies.
Dargent’s character exists in a state of continuous transmission: endless screenshots, fragments of video, dry reports sent nowhere. This gaze into the monitor is the perfect illustration of contemporary contact: the illusion of presence with the complete atrophy of the interlocutor. You are connected not to a person, but to an interface where emptiness has learned how to send notifications. The room does not save him. It locks him in. Society is somewhere out there, behind the screen, while you remain alone with yourself.
Every day at four in the morning he sends a short “réveil,” demonstratively stripped of any emotional debris like “how are you” or “I’m scared.” It is not a greeting and not a cry for help, but rather a compulsory mark on a timesheet, a technical report submitted to the void. Awakening here has nothing to do with the beginning of a new day; it is merely another authorisation in the system, an automatic confirmation of presence in the frame. Salerno deprives us even of the minimal right to psychologise: instead of human drama, we observe the operation of an indifferent algorithm, where the protagonist is reduced to a purely technical function — to press “continue” on time, so that the game of disappearance is not interrupted.
This teenager is not so much a subject as an empty terminal, waiting for some external confirmation of his own existence: a signal, a password, permission to end. When he tries a belt around his neck, there is not a single gram of that cheap transgressive pathos so often traded at independent film festivals; this is not a performance, but a routine fitting, as if he were simply checking how it will be, and then moving on. In Salerno, death is finally desacralised: it is not the outcome of tragedy, but the last item on the list. And the most disconsoling thing here is not the “horror” of the situation, but its frightening consistency. Our protagonist does not look insane; he is simply perfectly integrated into this reality, where total isolation has long since become the only possible social contract, and any attempt at intimacy looks like an irritating error not anticipated by the system.
The climax arrives in the form of a dry notification from @administrateur: matrix.org:
30 juin. C’est le jour de ta mort. Tu dois accepter.
The most repulsive thing in the final scenes is not even the cold steel of the blade, but that damned verb: accepter. Consent turned inside out and transformed into an ultimatum. You are forced to countersign your own departure, using skin instead of paper. And Dargent obeys almost mechanically, with the same somnambulant grace as someone already used to carrying things out. No pause, no questions. The photograph of the cuts flies into the emptiness of the chat as irrefutable proof of completed work — because any platform, whether social or suicidal, recognises only verifiable content.
For Salerno, this is his first feature film: the Australian-born director, now living in Paris, runs the small publishing house Kiddiepunk and worked as a cinematographer on projects by Dennis Cooper. Cooper can be heard here anyway, even if one knows nothing of the biographies. The Masturbator’s Heart revolves around familiar Cooper obsessions: agonising queer youth, the eroticised pull of death, adolescent worlds closed off to adults, and that strange mixture of tenderness and cruelty from which it is impossible to look away.
But the more important thing is elsewhere: the film takes these themes not as aesthetic merchandise, but as cold reality — without pose, without radical gloss. Salerno stubbornly avoids sweet conclusions, psychoanalytic decoding, moralising warnings. His task is the dry registration of the moment when the need to be understood is finally displaced by the will to disappear. This is no longer a cry for help. Rather, it is a decision to vanish — not to talk, not to explain, but to erase oneself completely.
And perhaps that is why the title, and the film itself, ultimately are not about provocation or “scandal.” They are about the point at which a person no longer needs a viewer; he needs a witness — but even the witness becomes excessive. And you leave the film with the feeling that you have been tested not for compassion, but for your ability to endure someone else’s emptiness without beautiful words. That same bar receipt: you want to hide it immediately, but if you throw it away, it will look as if nothing happened.
