Contraception is one of those subjects where technological progress and everyday behavior seem strangely out of sync. At a healthcare expo in Las Vegas, Vaishali Sinha asks a man if he uses birth control. His answer is that he does not, though his wife does. It is a small exchange, almost casual, yet it gives Give It a Shot its most useful starting point. Reproductive responsibility may belong to two people, but the physical burden has rarely been divided so neatly.
That imbalance becomes funnier, and stranger, once L.R. Fox starts walking the expo floor telling vendors that he is promoting male birth control. Condoms and vasectomies remain the two familiar male options, while pharmaceutical contraception has spent decades expanding mainly around women. Into that gap comes RISUG, or Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance, a long-lasting contraceptive developed in India by biomedical engineer Dr. Sujoy Guha.
The basic idea could easily send a documentary into medical-lecture territory. RISUG involves injecting a polymer into the vas deferens so sperm are disabled before reaching the ejaculate, with the procedure designed to remain reversible. Sinha understands that explaining this process clearly matters before she can ask viewers to care about its history. One animated sequence turns attacking sperm into targets for a tiny swordsman. It sounds ridiculous written down. On screen, it works because the image gives viewers something immediate to hold onto while the science catches up.
That is where Give It a Shot is especially good. It keeps finding ways to translate technical information into images, personalities, and jokes. Guha helps enormously. He has the relaxed manner of somebody who has spent so long explaining his work that the strangeness of it no longer registers. His early fascination with electric eels becomes part of the story of how he started thinking about electrical charge and reproductive biology. Elsewhere, a woman cheerfully observes that contraceptive products keep being made for the vagina while the penis is left sitting in the corner. The line gets a laugh, but it also compresses decades of reproductive policy into a few seconds.
I kept noticing how carefully the editing moves between these registers. Talking-head interviews give way to animation, historical context, convention footage, and testimony from people who have lived with the consequences of contraceptive decisions. Sinha rarely lets scientific explanation sit untouched long enough to become homework.
The human stories prevent RISUG from becoming a clever invention in search of a movie. One early trial participant, himself a doctor, reportedly examined his own semen under a microscope because he wanted proof that his sperm count had dropped to zero. The anecdote turns clinical testing into an act of personal verification. Another couple brings the stakes closer to the unequal burden framing the film. After the woman struggles with contraceptive pills, her husband learns about RISUG through other men and undergoes the procedure. Their satisfaction gives the technology a practical meaning that percentages cannot.
That pressure becomes far harder to shrug off when Sinha places Guha’s work against India’s history of mass sterilization. Programs intended to curb population growth placed severe pressure on both men and women, though the social expectation described by interviewees leaves women carrying much of the responsibility. The most painful example is Dinesh, whose wife dies after a botched sterilization damages her intestine. A debate about reproductive technology suddenly has a body attached to it, along with a family forced to absorb the cost of a procedure that went catastrophically wrong.
Sinha also shows an Akron, Ohio, couple discussing the husband’s vasectomy with evident satisfaction. Their presence quietly broadens the argument. Men already have some contraceptive agency, yet their choices remain remarkably narrow compared with the range of methods women are routinely expected to consider.
The documentary becomes structurally trickier once it moves from explaining RISUG to explaining why the technology has spent so long struggling to reach wider markets. The answer refuses to fit inside one villain. Guha’s research faced skepticism. International standards created further obstacles. Social anxiety around male contraception played its part. Pharmaceutical economics created another problem because a treatment designed to work for years after a single procedure does not naturally promise recurring sales.
That economic contradiction is painfully easy to understand. A product can make sense medically and socially while remaining awkward commercially. The film makes that tension visible without pretending regulatory scrutiny itself is absurd. Research conducted under one system may still have to satisfy the standards of another, and promising science does not receive automatic passage simply because its advocates believe in it.
The difficulty is that the documentary begins to inherit the stagnation it is describing. Early passages move with discovery: a surprising technology, an eccentric scientific history, appealing animation, and people who seem ready to move the idea forward. Later, another initiative appears, another partnership forms, another obstacle arrives, and progress slows again. The repetition is intellectually accurate, though less naturally dramatic.
Sinha keeps the film alive through personality, especially Guha’s warmth and Fox’s energetic advocacy. Fox’s motivation grows clearer when he discusses spending part of his childhood in care after living with an abusive mother. For him, access to better family planning connects to the welfare of children whose parents may be unable to care for them. His involvement stops feeling like salesmanship and becomes personal.
By the time Give It a Shot has traced RISUG across decades, the strangest thing about the technology is no longer how futuristic it sounds. It is how old the underlying idea already is. The film can explain the injection in minutes, animate what happens inside the vas deferens, and show couples who trusted the procedure and researchers who spent years refining it.
What proves far harder to visualize is the machinery surrounding innovation: regulation, investment, cultural expectation, gendered responsibility, and the long periods when everybody seems to be waiting for somebody else to move first. Sinha cannot make that waiting disappear, but she can make us understand exactly what is being delayed.
Give It a Shot was released in theaters on September 4, 2026, with distribution via ITVS International, Sandbox Films, and Coast to Coast Films. The documentary follows international researchers striving to successfully launch the first reversible male contraceptive since the modern condom was invented 200 years ago.
Full Credits
Title: Give It a Shot
Distributor: ITVS International, Sandbox Films, Coast to Coast Films
Release date: September 4, 2026
Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes (92 minutes)
Director: Vaishali Sinha
Producers and Executive Producers: Vaishali Sinha, Hemang Chheda, Lara Heintz, Tracie Holder, Carrie Lozano, Lois Vossen, Jessica Harrop, Caitlin Mae Burke, Nish Acharya
Cast: Kevin Eisenfrats, L. R. Fox, Sujoy Guha, Elaine Lissner
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Neil Barrett, Zachary Rockwood, Anup Singh, Shashank Walia
Editors: Sunita Prasad, Andrew Saunderson, Charu Takkar
Composer: Jonathan Kirkscey, Fred Lassen
The Review
Give It a Shot
Give It a Shot turns a dense history of reproductive science into an accessible, funny, and often infuriating documentary. Vaishali Sinha’s animation, editing, and character-focused interviews make RISUG easy to understand while keeping attention on the people living with contraceptive inequality. The film loses some momentum once decades of regulatory, commercial, and cultural obstruction begin piling up, yet that sluggishness reflects the very problem it examines. Its strongest achievement is making a complicated delay feel both understandable and absurd.
PROS
- Clear, accessible explanation of RISUG
- Humor makes difficult science approachable
- Strong use of animation and editing
- Human stories give the argument weight
- Guha and Fox provide engaging personalities
CONS
- Later stretches lose momentum
- Repeated obstacles create structural drag
- Institutional history occasionally overwhelms the human material
