Psychos, Protectors, and Those In-Between: Shades of Masculinities in the Films of Summer 2025
Eglė Karpavičiūtė
The summer of 2025 awarded cinema-goers with numerous masculine dilemmas and tensions that echoed concepts of male fragility, overcompensation, and gender-defying hope. Against the benchmark of the masculine satire and cinematic classic American Psycho, I focus on three recent films with contrasting male archetypes: Materialists, Friendship, and 28 Years Later, offering an insight into emerging representations of masculine wrongdoings and virtuousness in today’s mainstream visual culture.
Shades of male fragility resulting in attempts to overdo masculinity - and imminent gendered failures - are masterfully portrayed in Andrew deYoung’s full-feature debut Friendship: a dark comedy that focuses on the struggles of navigating new friendships as a middle-aged man. The film tells a story of Craig - an unassumingly dim and harmless PR specialist who falls head over heels for his new neighbour, Austin. Craig’s newly found idol happens to be a slightly famous and extremely charming weather man with a life that ticks all the boxes: he has a cool house, exotic hobbies, his own rock band, and - importantly - a solid group of loving and equally cool male friends. As Craig’s life lacks such a harmonious community, the film captures his efforts to alter a socially clumsy personality in order to fit into this male group, alongside the privileged position of becoming Austin’s chosen sidekick. Consequently, Craig acts out a series of homosocial behaviours, designed to impress and forge strong bonds with this enticing male tribe (Hammarén & Johansson, 2014).
Unable to fit in and met with rejection, Craig becomes a slave of his own fragile masculinity. His deep sense of frustration with being unwanted by male peers, and thus anger at his own masculine self, eventually translates into a chain of violent acts towards himself and others. Similar harmful masculine fractures have been analysed in the literary and cinematic cult classic American Psycho. In the 2000s film, its main character, a Wall Street banker Patrick Bateman, navigates a high-pressure environment of corporate America. Patrick hates his job and those who surround him, yet is ongoingly driven by the urgent need to fit among his male colleagues. Eventually, Patrick becomes consumed by the necessity to conform to external pressures of hegemonic masculinity, peer competition, and consumer capitalism (Sadhu, 2024), and shapeshifts into a violent villain who continuously reasserts his male dominance via brutal force. Through that, Patrick writes a turbulent story of his slow descent into madness. Meanwhile, in Friendship, Craig’s desire to belong drives his transformation from a dull guy next door, to an unpredictable protagonist who is capable of harming those he loves. Luckily for its viewer, the genre of dark humour turns Craig’s brutality into a brutally funny and occasionally (plus, one could argue, intentionally) uncomfortable watch. As Friendship’s vital exploration of the intersection of male vulnerability and violent overcompensation concludes, Craig’s pursuit for masculine domination becomes that which eventually destroys him (Krais, 1999).
An instant box office hit with an ambition to awaken the rom-com genre, Celine Song’s Materialists tells a paradigmatic story of a matchmaker Lucy who is caught in a love triangle. Following the genre canon, the romantic trifecta also involves a rich and handsome businessman Harry, and a broke yet striking actor John. As the film’s central theme seeks to address tensions regarding the importance of one’s socio-economic status in today’s dating market, masculine vulnerabilities enter the scene when seemingly perfect Harry - spoiler alert - confesses to having looksmaxxed his body by undergoing a height alteration procedure, in pursuit of becoming prime marriage material. Described as an embodied harm of hegemonic masculinity, looksmaxxing originates from a digital community that falls under the manosphere umbrella, and promotes a narrow idea of a socially acceptable and desired masculine physique. Such physique is crucially tied to peer approval, and offers a promise of social gains and eventual male domination. Importantly, looksmaxxing masks itself as self-improvement and leads to medicalisation of masculinities; as men pursue their wanted masculinity by engaging in surgical interventions, their desired masculine targets continue to be pushed further and further, consequently deepening social, moral, gendered, and physical harms, experienced by the men themselves (Halpin et al., 2025). And whilst the viewer never gets to tap into Harry’s social media habits, his reasoning for undergoing a height alteration procedure resonates with the abovementioned tenets of looksmaxxing.
Even though The Guardian describes Materialists' Harry as a “non-psycho version of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman” (Bradshaw, 2025, para. 3), the portrayal of Harry’s relationship with his own physique has connections to Patrick’s story. In American Psycho, the viewer gains their first intimate introduction to Patrick through a scene of his morning beauty routine, which has since become a pop culture classic and has been commodified by the beauty industry. Whilst Patrick employs an array of cosmetic products to construct an attractive outer shell as a way to act out his egomania, and thus counteract an inclination towards self-destruction; the ever-charming and ridiculously rich Harry surgically looksmaxxes his body to deal with his masculine insufficiencies and gain desirability points in the gamified and looks-driven world of contemporary dating. And though the viewer never witnesses a shift from Harry’s kind yet fragile self to a man who employs violent overcompensation as a way to deal with his self-perceived insufficiencies, one could argue that Harry’s looksmaxxing journey embodies a violent harm towards his masculine self.
An unlikely counter-narrative to fragile masculinity and its violent capacities arises from one of the most-awaited and divisive films of 2025: Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Years Later. A sequel to the original post-apocalyptic zombie film story from 2002, the 2025 film narrates a future world that, 28 years later, remains impacted by a zombie-producing virus. Set between an insular island and a zombie-dominated (and violence-ridden) mainland, the film opens with the main character, a teenage boy named Spike, commencing a masculine rite of passage with his alpha male-like father, Jamie. Suitably for a zombie film, this passage involves killing a zombie, and therefore securitising the desired role of a male protector of the zombie-free island. The plot thickens when Spike decides to reject this role and become a different kind of protector - one that his cheating father never could be - embarking upon a dangerous journey to a mainland-based doctor; all in pursuit of a diagnosis and cure for his severely sick mother.
In a rural community that chooses to turn a blind eye to the ill and the suffering, the twelve year old boy becomes a protector of common humanity and hope. Spike’s selfless mission embodies caring masculinity rooted in empathy, compassion, and prioritisation of care over violence (Eliott, 2016). And though 28 Years Later compares to American Psycho with its levels of explicit violence and gore, the film offers a vital counter-narrative to fragile and overcompensating masculinities, manifested via Spike’s radical determination, fearlessness, and care for others. In the end - who knew that the 2025 cinema summer would stand out as a season when gendered hope flourished within the most unexpected portrayals, such as the undeniable courage of a twelve year old boy… in a zombie horror trilogy.
Eglė Karpavičiūtė
PhD Candidate in Social Justice
UCD School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice
E: (opens in a new window)egle.karpaviciute1@ucdconnect.ie
References:
Bradshaw, P. (2025, August 13). Materialists review – Dakota Johnson torn between Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans in charming romcom. The Guardian. (opens in a new window)https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/aug/13/materialists-review-dakota-johnson-torn-between-pedro-pascal-and-chris-evans-in-charming-romcom
Elliott, K. (2016). Caring masculinities: Theorizing an emerging concept. Men and Masculinities, 19(3), 240–259. (opens in a new window)https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X15576203
Halpin, M., Gosse, M., Yeo, K., Handlovsky, I., & Maguire, F. (2025). When help is harm: Health, lookism and self‐improvement in the manosphere. Sociology of Health & Illness, 47(3), e70015. (opens in a new window)https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.70015
Hammarén, N., & Johansson, T. (2014). Homosociality: In between power and intimacy. Sage Open, 4(1), 2158244013518057. (opens in a new window)https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244013518057
Krais, B. (1999). On Pierre Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination. Travail, Genre et Sociétés, 1(1), 214–221. (opens in a new window)https://doi.org/10.3917/tgs.001.0214
Sadhu, T. (2024). “I want to fit in, but I don’t want to be a clone”: Exploring the fragility of masculinity through Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. International Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Studies, 6(2), 319–322. (opens in a new window)https://doi.org/10.33545/26648652.2024.v6.i2c.141