Not Ours to See
A Case Study of Beautiful They (2021)
Written by Joshua Allen
Founder and Executive Director, The Atlantis Awards
“Beautiful They makes Blue increasingly visible while refusing to make them increasingly classifiable. Recognition arrives only when Violet stops asking one body to produce one answer.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. Their purpose is to examine the craft behind exceptional filmmaking—celebrating successful creative choices and identifying the mechanisms behind why they work.
Content notice: This essay discusses chest binding, family estrangement, partial nudity, gender identity, and drug use.
Version Note: This essay uses the film’s uploaded master as its governing text, which runs 10:52. Tribeca presented the film’s world premiere in June 2021 and lists it as an eleven-minute Australian short written and directed by Cloudy Rhodes, starring Morgan Davies as Blue and Sariah Saibu as Violet.
The first title card appears against black, in silence. Then sound arrives before image: liquid pressure, underwater movement, a long exhalation that reads less like the gasp of someone breaking the surface than a slow release the film seems to produce before it has given that release a body. When the picture finally comes, it still withholds a face. A room. A printed image tacked to the wall. A person lying in bed, centered in frame, only the edge of a mouth visible. The film identifies a human form before it allows that form to become a character.
That ordering contains the whole short in miniature. Across its eleven minutes, Beautiful They gradually makes Blue more visible without making them more easily classifiable. It offers mouth, shoulder, back, hair, voice, reflection, bound torso, unbound intimacy, and finally a sustained close-up of Blue’s face. Each new piece supplies information. None of it settles the question a more conventional film might have trained its audience to expect the body to eventually answer.
Cloudy Rhodes has described the film, made not long after they began speaking publicly about their own non-binary identity, as personal and as an attempt to give young queer viewers a sense of refuge rather than another story that makes its characters survive trauma before earning tenderness. The craft achievement is that Beautiful They never treats being seen as a vague synonym for approval. It separates being visible from being legible, being looked at from being recognized, and private access from public display.
By the film’s final scene, Violet knows more about Blue’s body than the audience ever will. The camera does not correct that imbalance.
It protects it.
The Body Has to Come Before the Face
Blue wakes in fragments. A lighter can be heard before the film shows their hands—the source of an action stays offscreen while the body performing it remains only partially available. A wistful score enters as smoke curls from an incense stick, a bong sitting soft-focus behind it. The room doesn’t explain Blue, but it gives their morning a sensory environment: dim blue light, fabric, smoke, small rituals performed for no audience.
Blue sits with their back to camera, shirt off, a thin gold chain the one visual marker holding continuity while the framing divides the rest of the body into separate surfaces. They run a hand up through bleached hair and back down along the spine—a touch that reads as neither clearly self-conscious nor clearly self-soothing, and the film doesn’t resolve it for the audience either way. The first sustained view of Blue’s face arrives over the shoulder, their own body occluding everything from the clavicle down. Even once the face is finally granted, the image still refuses to complete the body beneath it.
Then Blue looks down. The edit answers with a near-subliminal flash of breast tissue, returns to Blue, then cuts to an unclothed, more conventionally masculine chest twisting lightly through frame. Neither insert is staged as an objective view of Blue’s own body—the film supplies anatomy without assigning it ownership. That distinction matters more than it might first appear. A more conventional short could use one image as confirmation and the other as fantasy, or mark one as the body Blue has and the other as the body Blue wants. Beautiful They declines to draw either line. The images stay associative and unclaimed, and in doing so they complicate any attempt to turn a single glance into a settled physical fact.
The end credits list Holly Rhodes and Nick O’Reagan as dancers. Because these abstract inserts are headless, movement-oriented, and disconnected from ordinary scene continuity, it’s a reasonable inference that at least some were built as separate choreographed studies rather than literal footage of the two leads—though the credits don’t assign specific shots to specific performers, so the inference has to stop there. What matters for the film itself is that these bodies arrive as possibilities rather than answers.
Blue begins wrapping their chest: pull, circle, tighten, secure. The torso becomes a practical problem to solve before the day can start, and the sequence never collapses into a single legible emotion—no tearful mirror confrontation, no line of dialogue explaining what Blue feels. The body is simply something that has to be managed. That restraint is what makes the mirror beat land as hauntingly as it does. Blue wets their hair at the faucet, ruffles it into place, inspects the result. The close view of the eyes suggests searching, but the mirror never delivers discovery—presentation can be altered and the outcome inspected, and neither action produces certainty.
The opening’s progression, then, isn’t face, identity, body. It’s body, intervention, face, inspection. Blue experiences the body before the audience can categorize it, changes the body before entering the day, and finds that visibility alone—even to themselves—doesn’t produce recognition. It can just as easily become one more surface the body gets measured against.
A Name Someone Else Likes
Blue rolls a joint on the bed, incense still curling through the room, then moves to the open window and breathes in with their eyes closed. Violet passes below and asks whether Blue is smoking weed. Blue’s answer is the first substantial vocal cue the film gives the audience, and Davies’s low register adds another piece of gendered information without resolving anything—sound complicates the image here rather than clarifying it, the same way the body inserts did.
Violet asks to come up. The staging tells the audience how each of them feels about that before either character says a word. Violet sits higher on the ledge, legs open, physically expansive. Blue sits lower and takes up less space—not weak, but cautious, as if any movement might reveal more than they’ve decided to offer yet. The joint gives them a first shared action, something that can pass between their hands before touch becomes intimate, proximity without a declaration required.
Then they trade names. Violet asks whether Blue is named for a favorite color. Blue tentatively agrees. Violet claims it as hers, but without specificity. Blue asks for clarification, Violet answers: “Blue. Blue’s my favorite color.” It’s flirtation, but it’s also a small act of recognition. Violet doesn’t ask what Blue is. She responds to what Blue has chosen to be called, and makes that name desirable rather than treating it as a request for further evidence. Blue remains Blue. Violet simply makes being Blue feel wanted.
Something Arrives Before Blue Does
An underwater image interrupts the room—brilliant aqua water, tiny rising bubbles, another exhalation in the sound mix—before the film returns to Violet’s face, drifting down toward her torso and the car keys clipped at her waist. As in the opening, sensation arrives ahead of narrative location: the film has shown water before Blue and Violet have even decided to go to the beach. This becomes one of editor Stewart Arnott’s recurring devices. Water precedes the beach. Warm bodies precede the bedroom. Touch seems to enter the film before Blue has found the confidence to initiate it—desire consistently outrunning confidence, the edit letting a coming state leak backward into the present before the story has earned its arrival there.
When Violet prepares to leave, Blue objects to her driving. Violet asks if Blue wants her to stay; Blue answers first through sound and gesture, then finally offers to drive. The offer solves two problems in one motion—Violet doesn’t drive impaired, and Blue gets more time without having to say why the time matters.
At the beach the film changes its physical grammar entirely. Blue stands small against the water while Violet takes to the waves. The credits distinguish Jordan Maddocks’s principal cinematography from Lee Kelly’s separate work as surf cinematographer, and that departmental split shows: the camera now has to track board, light, distance, and wave height while keeping Violet legible as a body moving with real skill through all of it. She isn’t merely shown at the beach. She’s shown being good at something, defined through balance, momentum, risk, and recovery rather than through anything Blue needs from her.
That distinction gives Blue, and the audience, another way of looking. A body doesn’t have to function as evidence for a category. It can be understood through what it does. The ocean doesn’t free Blue outright—Rhodes never stages the easy image of a body running into the water and emerging transformed. Blue stays mostly an observer, and the change that does occur happens through attention: they watch someone else use a body without apology, and something in that watching starts to loosen.
Violet’s confidence is not a model of the correct body. It’s a model of bodily presence.
The Silence Has to Hold
When Violet comes back to shore, the score’s wistfulness picks up a slight upward turn—nothing has been said yet, but the music lets the possibility become audible. They sit together without immediately filling the silence, until Violet asks whether Blue will let her drive them home. Blue quietly agrees. Crashing waves dominate the transition; then the ocean gives way to the smaller, enclosed sound of the car, and the score retreats. With motion suspended and the two of them confined beside each other, the film finally requires them to speak more directly than either has yet risked.
Violet asks Blue to come inside—her parents know she’s queer, and are mostly fine with it. When she asks about Blue’s parents, Davies struggles to hold eye contact. The desire is plainly there; what’s missing is the ability to act at the speed of that desire once the conversation starts touching parts of Blue’s life attraction alone can’t fix. Blue says: “I don’t talk to them anymore.” Rhodes supplies no flashback, no explanatory monologue, no single named wound. The sentence stays incomplete, and estrangement simply becomes part of the risk now built into Violet’s invitation.
Saibu’s response is the scene’s real craft. Violet doesn’t interrogate, doesn’t offer to replace what’s missing, doesn’t rush toward physical reassurance. She apologizes and stays steady—present, open, unhurried. That quiet gives Blue room to look back. Davies moves from a forced smile toward something more honestly reconnected, a performance suggesting Blue knows exactly what they want but has little practice trusting that wanting it will stay safe once someone else knows more. Violet doesn’t talk Blue into anything. She just makes room long enough for Blue to choose.
The Body Has to Become Landscape
Before Blue enters the house, the film cuts to nude bodies photographed close enough that anatomy stops being orientable. Curves fill the frame; skin becomes surface; a shoulder or side or back can read as a ridge or a fold rather than a body part. Heads are withheld throughout, so no face can anchor these images to either named character.
The closer the camera gets, the less useful the body becomes for classification—which inverts the ordinary promise of a close-up. Detail should mean more information. Here it means less identity. The credited dancers support reading this passage as a movement study rather than hidden continuity footage of the two leads, standing in for sensation and anticipation rather than anatomical documentation. This is where the film most directly refuses the assumption that an intimate camera has to be an evidentiary one: a body can be closely observed without being solved, can become shape and pressure and light without being asked to identify anyone in particular.
The Order Has to Protect the Reveal
Blue enters Violet’s room, and the finished image has warmed dramatically from the morning’s cool blue—amber, rose, soft violet filling the frame. However much of that shift belongs to lighting, to production design, to Maddocks’s photography, or to colourist Fergus Rotherham’s grade, the combined effect is unmistakable: Blue has moved into a space where cool self-inspection is no longer the room’s dominant condition. The palette doesn’t simply become Violet’s. It becomes shared.
Blue sits on the bed; the camera lingers on a hand flexing against the blanket, fabric sliding under their fingers. The film has changed sensory registers. The opening ran on sight—mirror, reflection, inspection. The bedroom leads with touch before it asks for undressing at all: Blue feels the blanket, Violet touches Blue’s hair, their foreheads meet. They learn each other through contact that doesn’t yet demand exposure. Blue tells Violet she’s cute. They kiss. Saibu, who has carried the film’s movement and confidence up to this point, slows down; Davies, who has carried its hesitation, begins to participate more visibly.
What follows is entirely Violet’s to conduct, and slowly. She removes her own shirt first and sits topless beside Blue—vulnerable before asking anything in return. Then, unhurried, she removes Blue’s overshirt. Then, separately, she lifts away the t-shirt beneath it, exposing the binder. Only after both layers are gone does she begin, just as slowly, to unwrap the binding itself. Blue does not initiate any stage of the undressing. What Blue controls instead is everything around it: sustained eye contact rather than looking away, reciprocal touch that keeps happening rather than stopping, a held stillness that reads as permission rather than passivity. The scene’s sense of safety comes from that accumulation—Violet’s earlier steadiness at the beach and in the car, the unhurried pace of each separate step, Blue’s continued presence inside a process they aren’t physically driving. Consent here isn’t a line of dialogue. It’s built into who moves, how slowly, and who keeps meeting whose eyes.
Blue looks uncertain. Also hopeful. The film doesn’t require complete confidence before intimacy can be sincere—Blue can want this and still feel the risk of being known inside it.
Not Ours to See
This is the moment a more conventional film would resolve the anatomical question it has spent ten minutes declining to answer. Blue’s shirt is gone. The binding is coming off. Violet is close enough to see whatever has been concealed since the opening.
The camera does not give that view to the audience. It stays behind Blue, near the shoulders, on the embrace, on the faces. Violet receives access the viewer does not. That withholding isn’t incidental modesty—it’s the payoff of everything the film has built toward since its first fragmented shot. Blue has agreed to be seen by Violet. Nothing in that permission transfers to whoever is watching the film.
As Violet kisses Blue’s neck, she suggests Blue could be her girlfriend. Then, a beat later: “And my boyfriend.” Violet has seen the body and declines to let it deliver a verdict. She doesn’t announce that anatomy is meaningless, and she doesn’t claim not to have noticed what she’s seen. She simply expands the relationship’s vocabulary so that no single physical fact has to cancel out the rest of who Blue is. It’s a different move than the more familiar reassurance of saying gender “doesn’t matter”—indifference would leave Blue’s complexity unseen. Violet’s version is additive. Both words stay available. Neither has to defeat the other before affection can continue.
Davies’s expression changes slowly—something releases, but the performance never collapses into a bigger reaction than the scene needs. Blue doesn’t transform into a newly confident person or explain what Violet’s words mean. The eyes soften. The vigilance doesn’t vanish so much as become briefly unnecessary.
At the beginning, Blue searched a reflection and found no answer. At the end, Blue looks at another person and no longer needs to produce one. The film’s real climax was never going to be Blue’s chest. It’s the effect of being recognized without being classified, and that effect only shows up on a face.
What Recognition Cannot Solve
The tenderness in Beautiful They is deliberate, and Rhodes has been consistent about the intent behind it—wanting the film to function as refuge rather than another queer story that has to pass through tragedy before arriving at tenderness. That refuge is also, by design, small: one afternoon, one room, one person who stays. The film doesn’t show Blue finding a wider community, repairing the family relationship, adopting safer binding methods, or carrying this recognition into the next morning. Violet holds nearly all the acceptance available inside the story’s runtime.
That’s a real limitation, not a hidden flaw the film is unaware of. A less careful short could have implied that the right lover simply solves alienation from one’s own body. Beautiful They resists that reading in several ways: Blue doesn’t become visually different once the binding comes off, the camera never presents the uncovered body as some newly authentic final form, and Violet never certifies Blue’s worth with a verdict. The closing image preserves some uncertainty in Davies’s face rather than manufacturing a total resolution. What’s offered is refuge, not cure.
Violet, for her part, remains less internally developed than Blue. The surf sequence gives her an independent physical life that exists before the bedroom—skill, pleasure, confidence with no relationship to Blue’s needs—but structurally she stays the person through whom Blue experiences safe recognition. In an eleven-minute film built entirely around Blue’s perspective, that’s an understandable proportion. It’s still the boundary of how the relationship is constructed.
The film names its most direct cost itself. After the credits, a card warns that using bandages to bind is unsafe and recommends consulting a health professional about safer practices. The bandage is the film’s most legible object—wound visibly, later removed strip by strip—which is exactly what makes it useful as cinema and risky as an image. A viewer moved by the film’s central metaphor could mistake the depicted method for a safe one. The card doesn’t erase the image or pretend Blue would necessarily have access to a better method. It separates the emotional truth of the gesture from its practical safety, so the metaphor can keep meaning something without being mistaken for instruction.
A final card acknowledges that the film was made on Aboriginal land that was never ceded, and pays respect to the traditional owners of the land on which it was made and screens. That card isn’t part of the film’s narrative mechanism, but it places the short’s small, intimate refuge inside a much larger and unresolved one—responsibility extending not just to how bodies get represented, but to where the representation itself was made.
The Face Has to Come After the Body
Beautiful They begins with a body before a face—mouth, shoulder, back, chest fragments, binding, reflection, each image seeming to promise the accumulated evidence will eventually produce a stable answer. It doesn’t. By the end the film has reversed that order entirely. The body is revealed privately, to one person. The face is held publicly, for everyone watching.
Violet sees what the audience never will, and the emotional outcome is unmistakable anyway. Recognition doesn’t arrive because Violet successfully determines what category Blue’s anatomy proves. It arrives because she refuses to let one body carry only one possible meaning. Nothing about Blue becomes less ambiguous by the film’s end. What changes is whether that ambiguity gets treated as a problem in the first place.
That’s why withholding the final image matters as craft, not modesty. Had Rhodes shown Blue fully, that image would have become the answer against which every earlier gesture got retroactively measured—viewers leaving the film able to say what Blue “really” was, using the one moment of full disclosure to settle a question the rest of the runtime had spent dismantling. Instead the audience is left exactly where Violet has already moved past.
We do not know. We do not need to know.
The film never shows us what Violet sees.
It shows us what being seen does.
A Note on Sourcing: This essay is grounded primarily in direct viewing of the uploaded 10:52 master, including its complete closing credits, binding-safety card, and Acknowledgement of Country. Scene description, shot order, staging, and the reading of the film’s gaze structure throughout are Atlantis’s own, unless otherwise attributed below.
Release year, premiere status, and principal credits were checked against Tribeca’s own festival listing, which confirms the film’s June 2021 world premiere.
Cloudy Rhodes’s account of the film as personal, and as an attempt to give young queer viewers a sense of refuge rather than a story built around trauma, is drawn from two interviews: a Q&A with Screen NSW conducted ahead of the film’s Flickerfest screening, and an earlier RUSSH interview published in November 2020, before the film’s release, in which Rhodes independently describes it—unprompted, and prior to any public reception—as “basically about the refuge found in being seen in my gender identity.” That same RUSSH interview is the source for Rhodes’s account of wanting to “move beyond the binary” and show audiences “more ways of looking at things,” and for their description of wanting the work to feel like “this queer utopia that could be possible for young people.” Neither interview addresses the specific shot-level argument this essay makes about the withheld chest image; that argument is Atlantis’s own, built from the direction of the gaze, the order and pacing of the undressing, and the camera’s placement during the unwrapping, not a claim Rhodes has made on the record.
Biographical details for Cloudy Rhodes—prior short films including Lo Loves You and Deluge, and work across commercial and editorial photography—are drawn from Rhodes’s own site and from contemporaneous press including Campaign Brief and IF Magazine.
Crew credits beyond the film’s primary cast and director—cinematographer Jordan Maddocks, surf cinematographer Lee Kelly, editor Stewart Arnott, composer Freya Berkhout, sound designer Simon Rosenberg, production designer Emma Rose White, colourist Fergus Rotherham, and dancers Holly Rhodes and Nick O’Reagan—are transcribed directly from the film’s own closing credits as they appear in the uploaded master. The inference that the dancers’ footage supplies the film’s abstract body inserts is a reasonable reading of the credit rather than a confirmed production fact, and this essay treats it as such throughout.