Custom

In the ever-expanding landscape of genre cinema where crime films become horror films, Custom emerges as a film that is strange, sensual, and quietly subtle. Written and directed by Tiago Teixeira, this British picture dares to take its time, inviting audiences into a dark world where performance, sex, art, and identity blur into one. It’s an ambitious film, while its meditation with a commitment to tone, theme, and performance gives the work intelligence and emotional weight.

At the center of Custom are two strong performances by Abigail Hardingham and Rowan Polonski. The pair play Harriet and Jasper, avant-garde performance artists struggling to fund their work and pay rent, who turn to creating commissioned erotic videos for anonymous clients. What begins as mildly taboo staged BDSM and roleplay mutates into something stranger and more ritualistic when a patron known only as “The Audience” offers £10,000 for a series of requests with unusual conditions: the videos must be shot on an old VHS camcorder, and under no circumstances are they to watch the footage themselves.

It’s a premise that could easily have veered into the gratuitous or the exploitative. But Custom avoids that entirely. Much of this is thanks to the leads. Polonski (whose name may nod to Roman Polanski) and Hardingham aren’t just games; they’re deeply present. Their commitment, especially to scenes that show sexual power dynamics, is admirable without being flashy. Hardingham, in particular, brings a rich emotional depth of lazy sensuality that elevates the film from genre curiosity to something more intimate and aching. Her performance walks a fine line between agency and vulnerability

One of Custom’s greatest strengths is how it handles erotic content with maturity and nuance. Tiago Teixeira treats the erotic not as titillation, but as transformation. Sex is labor, yes, but also ritual and expression.

“A patron known only as ‘The Audience’ offers £10,000 for a series of requests with unusual conditions.”

Custom channels more than just David Cronenberg’s body horror, sexuality, and media, as in Videodrome, it also echoes the confrontational style of Andy Warhol’s underground films. Jasper and Harriet, dressed in black and red, sitting across from each other in stark settings, become reminiscent of the camera-fixed provocations of Flesh and Trash, with Polonski in particular suggesting the ghost of Joe Dallesandro not in look, but in the way he performs intimacy. Like Warhol’s Factory era films with no budget, the camera here doesn’t flinch.

It watches. It records. It dares the viewer to keep looking even when the performers have stopped pretending.

The VHS medium itself is fetishized in Custom as both a relic of the ‘Video Nasties’ days in the UK, shown brilliantly in another British film, Prano Bailey-Bonds Censor. Just as Warhol turned the static camera into an unblinking eye of desire, Teixeira uses analogue media to invoke texture, voyeurism, with a touch of nostalgia to those days of ‘raincoat” cinema and under-the-counter videos. The film does all this without being cliché or descending into outright pornography of extreme sex and violence.

Visually and sonically, Custom is striking. Teixeira and cinematographer Philipp Morozov make excellent use of a restricted color palette and tightly framed compositions to evoke an atmosphere. The sound design deserves special praise. Droning ambience, distorted frequencies, and ominous silence envelop the film, especially towards the end. Dialogue fades, replaced by sensation. The result is immersive, disorienting, and oddly beautiful,l very much like a score from the band Goblin.

Viewers craving a tight, plot-driven thriller, the film’s slow unraveling and minimalistic style may prove frustrating. Custom is a bold film that asks much from its audience but rewards patience with something haunting and surprisingly human. Its exploration of erotic labor, relationships, and. Hardingham and Polonski give fearless performances that are sensual, like finding lipstick traces on a cigarette. Custom stands as one of the more daring and thoughtful British genre films in recent memory.