A trailer for Joe Locke's next big swing after Heartstopper, a Welsh mystery-thriller called Black Church Bay, briefly went live online this week before getting pulled almost as fast, leaving fans confused about what they'd actually seen.
What the Trailer Showed, Briefly
Before it disappeared, the clip confirmed what first-look photos and festival synopses had already suggested: Locke plays Jasper, a sixth-form student (roughly a U.S. high school junior or senior) who begins a secret relationship with his teacher, Barry, played by Tom Cullen. The two sneak off for a weekend on a boat, things turn intimate, and then Jasper vanishes. What follows is a manhunt that closes in on Barry, while Jasper's boyfriend and classmate Miles, played by newcomer Dylan Michael, starts asking uncomfortable questions about how close teacher and student really were.
The film comes from Welsh-Irish writer-director Rhys Marc Jones, an NYU Tisch-trained filmmaker and three-time BAFTA Scholarship recipient, whose stated intent is to explore how far someone will go to hide who they really are. That framing matters, because the story he's telling sits right on top of some genuinely uncomfortable ground.
Barry is very much depicted as being in the wrong and he'll likely have to face the consequences of his actions, which the trailer shows quite clearly.
Why the Clip Vanished Is Still a Mystery
Nobody involved with the production has explained why the trailer went up and came down so quickly. The most plausible read is simply that someone hit publish before the rollout was ready. Adding to the confusion, the Busan International Film Festival's own site listed a play button for the trailer that, when clicked, returned a message saying the video had been removed by the uploader.
The timing is awkward either way. Black Church Bay was already set to make its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 15 and 17, but it was also just added to the Busan lineup, a festival running October 6 through 15, which means Busan will technically get first crack at the film. A studio juggling two premiere dates and two territories has plenty of reasons to be careful about when and how footage goes public, even without any grand mystery attached.
Locke's Deliberate Pivot
Since wrapping Heartstopper Forever, Locke has been stacking up decidedly grown-up projects. He's playing closeted actor Ian Charleson opposite Andrew Scott in the awards-buzzed biopic Elsinore, and reportedly signed on for the sci-fi film Baby, in which he plays a sex worker impregnated by a mysterious creature. Black Church Bay fits that same pattern: a conscious, sometimes jarring, break from the wholesome teen romance that made him famous.
Cullen brings his own credibility to the project. He's best known to queer audiences for Weekend, Andrew Haigh's quietly devastating romance, which gives Black Church Bay a pedigree beyond just stunt casting.
Our Read
Stories built around teacher-student relationships are always going to draw scrutiny, and this one should. Even with Jasper at or above the U.K.'s age of consent of 16, the power imbalance between a student and his teacher doesn't disappear because the law technically allows it, and plenty of viewers online have already called the dynamic what it is: grooming.
That doesn't automatically make the film irresponsible. From what's been described, Black Church Bay isn't asking audiences to root for Barry; it's asking them to understand how shame and repression can push someone toward genuinely harmful choices, while still holding him accountable for them. There's a real difference between depicting something critically and endorsing it, and a film that lets its wrongdoer face consequences is doing something different than one that romanticizes the affair. Whether Jones actually pulls that off is something we won't know until festival audiences in Busan and London get a proper look.
What to Watch
For now, the trailer is offline and the questions outnumber the answers. We'll be watching for the official rollout, and for how audiences in Busan and London react once they see the full film rather than a leaked clip and a synopsis.
Source: Queerty
Poster via The Movie Database (TMDB)
