2026 SEDONA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW! Director/writer Honey Lauren’s dramatic feature Mistake follows Larry Benson (Dominic Bogart), a viciously angry man in the rural South in the 1970s, who is always ready to fight. Larry is intersex. He suffers from being different and from the side effects of the testosterone shots he has endured since 12 years of age. Following the conventions of the time, the doctor at his birth in 1941 asked his parents to choose his gender. His father (Matt Bogart) decides the baby is a boy.
We meet Larry in 1971 as a 30-year-old with a fractured identity. He was raised on his father’s tobacco farm. Larry’s mercurial nature causes him to cross paths frequently with the town sheriff (Brett Cullen), who warns him that he’ll go to jail for fighting.
The one ray of light in Larry’s world is his childhood best friend Lily (Jiji Hise). Lily is developmentally disabled, but high functioning, and she’s happiest in Larry’s company. She is described as immature, childlike, and “slow,” but she turns out to have emotional intelligence far greater than anyone around her. She deeply understands Larry and comforts him when the hormone shots cause him intense pain.
When the sheriff’s prediction comes true, and Larry has to serve a six-month sentence, the warden declines to provide him with the gender-affirming testosterone. This break from the hormones causes physical changes and gives him a chance to consider what life as a woman would be like. He begins to question whether his father made the right choice when he was born. Aunt Peg (Honey Lauren) tries to convince Larry to come to California, where she lives, but he declines because his father needs help on the farm. Lily accepts him unconditionally in whatever physical form he inhabits. Not everyone feels this way, and the stage is set for a dramatic, tragic conclusion.
“… Larry is born intersex in a small Southern town in the early 1970s …”
These days, intersex babies are allowed to reach an age where they can decide for themselves whether to make a binary gender choice or not. For most, there are no negative health implications for not choosing. While these traits only occur in a small percentage of births, being intersex is no longer considered a medical disorder, but rather a rare variation. Mistake takes on these issues with intelligence, empathy, and brutal honesty in exploring the consequences both of assigning a gender at birth and of the social stigma of not fitting into the traditional binary model in a small Southern town.
The beating heart of this film is in the powerful, grounded performances that rouse empathy in the viewer, particularly Jiji Hise and Dominic Bogart as Lily and Larry. Honey Lauren herself plays Larry’s Aunt Peg, and there’s a solid part delivered by Kay Lenz, who we haven’t seen in some time, as Larry’s mother.
Mistake is authentic and carefully considered, with one minor nitpick : the dialect meant to convey the rural South in the early 1970’s is exaggerated to the point of caricature. In fact, by the 1970s, the most intense Southern accent sounded more like Walton Goggins’ character, Boyd Crowder, in the television series Justified. Or Jennifer Lawrence’s rural Ozark Mountain accent in Winter’s Bone. Even with regional and socioeconomic differences, there was no one talking like the characters in this film. It’s a forgivable sin, but also one that could easily have been avoided.
Slight faults aside, Mistake is a beautifully written, acted, and thoughtfully produced look at the life of someone who is different in a time and place where differences are shameful.
Learn more at the official Mistake website.
"…takes on these issues with intelligence, empathy, and brutal honesty"
