Robin is asked to describe his strengths at a job-centre interview. He tries to answer, digresses, gestures, and only gradually do we see the other jobseekers watching him. They advise him on his delivery; one comments on his Afro. What first looked like a conversation between an applicant and an interviewer has become a public assessment of how Robin presents himself. The camera’s delayed reveal makes the scrutiny briefly unsettling for the viewer, too.
Later, Robin and the interviewer exchange roles and rehearse the encounter again. The reversal matters because the rules that seemed to belong to the interviewer can be performed by someone else. In Bertil Nilsson’s British feature debut Masc, Robin (Joshua Griffin) is learning such rules across work, friendship, and desire. He is gay, biracial, and neurodivergent, but the film rarely treats those identities as a ready explanation for every awkward exchange. It pays closer attention to who gets to judge an interaction, and how quickly the terms can change.
That attention gives the film its particular sense of London. The job centre has its instructions for making a favorable impression; a construction job runs on banter; a gym offers Robin the spectacle of Benji (Tega Alexander) and another man competing at the bench press.
Nilsson finds comedy in the labor of reading these settings. Yet the construction workers continue their sexual joking after Robin mentions seeing a man. Their response complicates an easy reading of Robin as someone rejected wherever he goes. Sometimes he is uncertain about a code that proves less restrictive than he expected.
For a viewer outside Britain, the interview’s embarrassment needs little translation. Its details still matter: the institutional exercise, the invitation to other applicants to appraise Robin, the casual judgment of his hair. Masc draws on a recognizable strain of British social comedy, where embarrassment gathers because everyone understands the ceremony and no one can quite escape it. Nilsson gives that comedy an unusual visual grammar. The shifting camera and abrupt edits deny us a settled view of the room before revealing its full audience. We experience the discomfort of having interpreted the situation too soon.
The film covers roughly a year in five parts, with Robin changing jobs, hairstyles, and company. Editor Anna Meller’s sharp transitions can make those passages feel like separate encounters rather than steps along a tidy path to self-knowledge. Robin records voices and studies the men around him, borrowing ways of speaking and behaving. The title joins masculine presentation to masking, but the film is attentive to the pleasures and uncertainties of imitation as well as its strain. Watching Benji lift weights, Robin can be amused by the display even as he tries to understand what Benji makes of him.
Griffin holds these fragments together through physical detail. His guarded posture and alert eyes suggest the effort of following several signals at once; his movement becomes easier when he is alone. During an overnight visit with Benji, a familiar intimate situation acquires several possible meanings for Robin, and Griffin lets hope and caution occupy the same pause. Nilsson and Griffin developed the story together, and the performance gives the film room to leave Robin’s responses unsettled. His quietness does not always mean discomfort, just as an apparently assured smile does not settle what he wants.
A trip with Robin’s father, played by Lincoln Conway, brings a different form of masculinity into view. The two struggle to put up a tent, occupied by a small practical problem while finding conversation harder. Their shared task permits a kind of closeness without requiring either man to say precisely what the visit means. Robin’s spontaneous dancing works differently again. Against his careful attention to other people’s voices and manners, movement offers him a means of expression that needs no rehearsal of the right words. The film’s interest in physical theatre comes through most persuasively in that distinction.
Nilsson sometimes presses the theatrical side further than the material can bear. Cam (Robbie Bellekom), a talkative colleague at Robin’s lab job, brings nervous energy to their exchanges and speaks about preparing for social interactions, but the episode has less to discover about their relationship than the visits with Benji or Robin’s father. The final gathering, which brings several familiar faces into discussion, improvisation, and dance, has a similar difficulty. Its openness is appealing; its staged quality makes feelings that were once visible through small adjustments seem closer to being explained.
The ending remains an interesting risk because it changes the conditions under which Robin has spent the film being watched. People who occupied separate parts of his life now share a space in which expression can be tried out rather than immediately judged as successful or mistaken. Masc is strongest when it lets us feel the difference between those conditions, as in the interview room, the tent, or the unguarded movement of a dance. The final gathering cannot give Robin a settled self, but it allows him to take part without first knowing exactly how he should appear.
Masc world-premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, 2026. The British drama follows a young autistic queer man navigating London’s subcultures as he alters his appearance and mannerisms to fit different expectations of masculinity.
Full Credits
Title: Masc
Distributor: Duktiga
Release date: September 12, 2026 (Toronto International Film Festival)
Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes (83 minutes)
Director: Bertil Nilsson
Writers: Bertil Nilsson, Joshua Griffin
Producers and Executive Producers: Bertil Nilsson, Joanne Michael
Cast: Joshua Griffin, Tega Alexander, Ed White, Reece King, Lincoln Conway, Robbie Bellekom, Hi Ching
Editors: Anna Meller
Composer: Daniel Sonabend
The Review
Masc
Bertil Nilsson finds both comedy and unease in the social rules Robin must learn across London. Joshua Griffin makes that effort visible through watchful stillness and freer movement when Robin is alone. The sharp editing gives his changing world a persuasive rhythm, though Cam’s episode and the staged final gathering lack the precision of the film’s quieter encounters. Masc trusts its strongest scenes to leave identity unsettled.
PROS
- Griffin’s observant, physical performance
- Specific portrait of London’s social codes
- Editing that gives Robin’s uncertainty form
CONS
- Cam’s episode feels less developed
- The final gathering explains too much
