BOOM! Maiara Walsh’s (who also co-writes and co-stars with Cameron Cowperthwaite) Bight is a blisteringly brilliant debut feature that sizzles with Adrian Lyne’s carnal shadows and soft textures spliced with the nihilism and social critique found in Bret Easton Ellis’s work.
The picture opens with our introduction to Atticus (Cameron Cowperthwaite), a disillusioned artist, and Charlie (Maiara Walsh), a social media manager grappling with emotional obstacles, a couple careworn with the aftershock of private injury and splintered vocational desires.
Avoiding the issue, Charlie, at first enthusiastically, presses Atticus to accompany her to attend a congregation engineered by their friends Sebastian (Mark Hapka), an assertively pretentious photographer, and Naomi (Maya Stojan), a painter with a secret connection to one of her guests.
The atmosphere is pleasant, though strained. There’s a tension drifting around the room, and each character responds to it in different ways. The meal unfolds pleasantly enough, and the warmth of the hosts flows liberally over the banquet table, albeit over-generously, especially with Sebastian’s frequent intellectual footnotes. But, as the evening develops, secret pressures and long-held confidences regarding their previous affairs are visible, leading to a significant psychological fallout among friends.
Charlie (Maiara Walsh) and Atticus (Cameron Cowperthwaite) confront desire and control in Bight (2026).
“…a couple careworn with the aftershock of private injury and splintered vocation desires…”
They placed an indecent proposal on the table. Sebastian is completing a series of works with a theme gravitating toward sensory surrender. Atticus is quick to refuse, and Sebastian doesn’t push. Instead, Charlie and her man rationalize one more time. They are in an awkward place. Perhaps a transgressive experience might be transformative? This couple, torn between how they truly feel about each other and their loyalties to each other, shall pit their hearts and their commitment against a duo seeking an extreme experience to feel something authentic. People who are hastily flawless but internally cleft.
Charlie eventually convinces Atticus to give in, despite warning her that the event could be a breaking point and not the bridge back to the happiness they once had. While the couple disrobe and mentally prepare to shed their inhibitions, unbeknownst to the participants in this naughty nighttime photo shoot, Sebastian has thrown a little chemical enhancement to take the adventure to the edge, and possibly over it. Dropping small amounts of an unnamed substance into his precious tea, which he persistently comments on during the evening regarding its excellence, he now convinces his guests to sample it.
As Bight expertly unfurls, the once popular erotic thriller genre is both deified and heightened, as control and desire, jealousy and betrayal, all the green-eyed monsters fueled by lust, ego, and vanity, assemble as emotional devastation disintegrates into something loathsome, sinister, and sadistic.
Bravo to the entire quartet of players, the scalpel-sharp screenplay by Cowperthwaite and Walsh, and to the aforementioned as director, for her courage and determination to not merely remind us of the passion and the power that used to make sensual whodunits the electrifying essential for cinema goers once upon a time in the 20th century.
Bight brings back stylish, sweaty, sexy, suspicion, and savagery in this both enticing and engaging intersection of vitreous aesthetics and ethical deterioration. See it!
"…brings back stylish, sweaty, sexy, suspicion and savagery..."
