Dylan Brady wants queer cinema to make room for the uncomfortable, the complicated, and the downright difficult to explain. The actor and filmmaker has taken that ambition behind the camera with ANON, a short psychological thriller that refuses to offer audiences the reassuring emotional clarity, something that has become a trademark of contemporary queer storytelling.

The deliberate departure from familiar representations is, in fact, by design. It reflects the actor-slash-director's growing weariness with narrowly explored queer experiences available on screen. As Brady sees it, it is not that uplifting queer stories exist, but that they are treated as the only ones worth telling.

Queer cinema has admittedly expanded in the last few decades; LGBTQ+ experiences are now welcomingly integrated into mainstream entertainment. The greater visibility, however, does not automatically translate into greater narrative freedom. ANON maker Dylan Brady has questioned exactly this tendency that molds queer stories into aspirational, hopeful, and safe narratives.

"I think it's important that queer characters and characters from different parts of the world are able to be just as complicated and murky and interesting as everyone else," he told Film Updates in a recent interview. He argued that such portrayals cannot possibly account for the full range of experiences within the community.

Speaking to Film Updates about the kind of representation he wants to see, Brady made his position particularly clear: the point is not to abandon positive representation. It is to question why queer characters should be held to a different standard of moral legibility than their h*********** counterparts.

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Brady’s frustration with the stories Hollywood keeps telling eventually pushed him to stop waiting for a different kind of film to appear and make one himself.

Dylan Brady, 29, has built his career across acting and writing. His credits include Mary & George, The Diplomat, Sebastian, and Netflix’s Everything Now. His transition into directing was actually not a childhood ambition, as per his interview with Attitude, but a gradual discovery that he could create the stories he wanted to see.

Mentored through the BFI Flare x BAFTA screenwriting program by filmmaker Andrew Haigh, he eventually wrote and directed ANON. The financing, however, proved to be trickier than expected, and Brady ended up funding much of the production himself after struggling to secure backing.

Shot entirely on dash cameras in his hometown of Derby, ANON follows Con O’Neill as a closeted taxi driver whose encounter with a young male passenger takes an unsettling turn. The filmmaker has revealed that the story draws partly from his own experience growing up, particularly his reflections on how the same encounter can carry entirely different meanings depending on age, geography, and access to queer identity.

By placing those contradictions inside a psychological thriller, Brady makes the film an expression of his filmmaking instincts as much as his argument about representation on the big screen.

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Do you agree with Dylan Brady? Let us know in the comments.