SEDONA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! Writer/director Honey Lauren’s dramatic feature Mistake follows Larry Benson (Dominic Bogart), who always seems ready for a fight. The viciously angry man lives in the rural South. Larry is intersex and suffers from being different and from the side effects of the testosterone shots he has endured since 12-years-old. Following the conventions of the time, the doctor at his birth in 1941 asked his parents to choose his gender. Larry’s father (Matt Bogart) decided the baby was 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 is 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. Lily deeply understands Larry and comforts him when the hormone shots cause him intense pain.
When the sheriff’s prediction comes true, and Larry serves 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, which sets the stage for a dramatic, tragic conclusion.
“…the warden declines to provide [Larry] with the gender-affirming testosterone…gives him a chance to consider what life as a woman would be like.”
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 the story lies in the powerful, grounded performances which rouse empathy in the viewer, particularly Jiji Hise and Dominic Bogart as Lily and Larry. The filmmaker herself plays 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 1970s is exaggerated to the point of caricature. In fact, by that time, the most intense Southern accent sounded more like Walton Goggins’s 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.
Mistake screened at the 2026 Sedona International Film Festival. Learn more at the official Mistake site.
"…beautifully written, acted, and thoughtfully produced..."
