Reflective Encounters

“Centred on a seemingly free-form ménage à quatre but with its focus squarely on Sara, driven to distraction after witnessing her female friend’s orgasm, Are You OK is delineated into a precise three act structure, the main thrust of which comes in its middle section. Suddenly arriving at a new hyperawareness of her surroundings in which everything has become both amplified and imbued with sexual suggestiveness, Sara’s envy and implicit sense of inadequacy is articulated in a mixture of longing stares and frenetic montages of imagery. Her eventual outlet, masturbation, perhaps offers only partial catharsis.

This subjective interior frenzy is, however, at odds with the film’s languorous bookends, whose mises en scène recall more classical forms: the first a mannered candlelit interior compositionally resembling a baroque painting, the second a genteel luncheon on the grass interloped by the women’s naked male companions larking together in the far distance. The gaze of the camera, which began on the naked Sara supine on a chair, has seemingly undergone at least a partial transition from the male to the female. Sara’s own enlightenment to the world of female pleasure appears similarly nascent but no less quietly transformative.”

— Jonathan Bygraves