Q&A with director Sam McConnell following the screening
Brock Yurich flexes much more than his glistening, rippling muscles in Test. He wrote the film’s script, based on his own exploits as a competitive bodybuilder. And he stars as Eddie, an ambitious lifter living in rural Ohio who’s ready and willing to do whatever it takes to make the leap from journeyman amateur to formidable pro. There has been a glut of juiced-up movies in this vein in recent years—The Smashing Machine, Love Lies Bleeding, The Iron Claw, et al.—but Test is an effective counterpoint to the operatic excess of those movies and countless others that came before. Instead of the usual morality play, where shame is channeled through addiction, rage, and violence that spirals out of control, Yurich and director Sam McConnell sculpt a more nuanced, sympathetic portrait and smartly equate the rituals of weightlifting with the body worship of the Catholic Church and online sex work. Test still has the doses of body horror that are a staple of these musclebound flicks, with plenty of fetishy shots of skin stretched over muscle, but it’s the rare sports movie that is as much an internal journey as a quest for physical perfection. ~OO