Writer-director Taylor Ghrist’s Dangling Carrot captures the restless rhythms of modern gay living in New York City, where desire, loneliness, and fleeting connections collide. Both intimate and unflinching, the film follows a young man searching for meaning in a world where emotional honesty is often buried deep beneath casual encounters.
Ghrist plays Taylor, an unemployed gay millennial living alone in his small New York apartment with his cat. During the day, he spends time with his best friends, Liz (Claire Banse) and Tara (Niki Takesh), before hitting the apps looking for love. Each date he goes on starts with a hookup and ends with ghosting. After a misdialed phone call, Taylor meets Sam (Hassan Galedary), a straight gym-goer looking for a girl he met days before. They end up hanging out, smoking weed, and doing pull-ups at the park. Sam offers to train Taylor, and their friendship develops into a series of workouts and casual hangouts. Sam soon lets Taylor provide some “release” while playing video games.
Later, while at the park, Taylor meets Sebastián (Gustavo Rojo) in a chance encounter involving bird droppings. Taylor jokes that he gives good massages, and Sebastián takes him up on the offer. The moment marks the beginning of another potential relationship, as Taylor once again moves toward intimacy that may complicate his efforts to stay grounded and sober.
“Each date he goes on starts with a hookup and ends with ghosting.”
Ghrist created Dangling Carrot as a deeply personal exploration of modern gay identity, intimacy, and loneliness gay men may feel in New York City. Drawing from his own experiences, Ghrist wanted to capture the emotional disconnection that often exists beneath the city’s sex-positive and hyper-masculine culture. His goal was to examine how the ease of physical connection contrasts with the difficulty of genuine emotional understanding, which some would call narcissism. The film invites viewers to question how modern relationships, gay or straight, struggle against the backdrop of isolation and desire.
What comes through in Dangling Carrot is authentic storytelling from Ghrist. I’ve seen many films about a gay man trying to find love and connection in New York City. Often, the story is masked by comic sketches from one scene to the next. But there is an authenticity that comes across in Ghrist’s encounters. He’s not going for the laugh; instead, he’s going for the truth behind each encounter. In almost every case, his “date” gets far more out of the moment than Taylor. I don’t want to spoil anything, but it all builds up to a very emotional third act. There’s a poker term known as “going on tilt.” It’s raw, heartbreaking, and honest storytelling.
Dangling Carrot does the one thing that all good dramas…films for that matter…need to do, and that is to make your audience feel. Gay or straight, to put you in the shoes of the protagonist and feel what they’re feeling. Better yet, it makes you want to yell “stop” as our hero inches his way down the wrong path. Dangling Carrot resonates because it never flinches from the messy truth of human need; in return, Ghrist’s work is both deeply moving and profoundly real.
"…raw, heartbreaking, and honest storytelling."
