VMI Releasing is excited to announce North American VOD release of Ganymede, a campy Southern Gothic thriller from life and creative partners Colby Holt and Sam Probst. Ganymede made its world premiere at the 41st Reeling International Film Festival, where the film took home the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature Film. At the Chattanooga Film Festival, the film won the Pride Award. Ganymede debuts on Cable and Digital VOD August 6, 2024, including Apple TV, Fandango at Home and Prime Video.

Do you feel like you ever had the coming-of-age time in your life? The kind of going-on around your growing up that fundamentally changed who you were and how you thought about the world?

I’m not sure I ever did. Not as a young man, at least. I was mostly an oblivious, selfish teenager. And even into my twenties, I had a great number of character flaws. Hell, I was worse in my 20’s than I was as a teen.

It wasn’t until my mid-to-late twenties where I started really working on myself to become a better human being. And I don’t recall any life-changing occurrence that kick started that.

Ganymede is the coming-of-age story of two high school teenagers. There is Kyle, the proudly out homosexual who, though bullied, knows who he is and what it wants. And the target of his youthful affections is Lee, a buttoned-up wrestler from a profoundly religious family.

When Kyle signs up for garbage pick-up duty–a duty only Lee has also signed on for because his parents make him–the two strike up a friendship that alters the course of both of their lives.

It also coincides with Lee having visions of a strange monster stalking him. So the questions are: how will Lee and Kyle’s relationship develop when they come from such a different worlds, and will Lee survive the strange being he feels is coming after him? And what will Lee’s family think of everything through which he is going?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ The dual lead performances from Pablo Castelblanco and Jordan Doww as Kyle and Lee respectively are both quite strong. Both young men went into this movie with their working boots on, and they put forth the effort to make Ganymede as high quality of a picture as they could. Pablo’s wide-eyed optimism and hopefulness and strength of character is measured against Jordan’s guilt and internal struggle, and both lead to turns full of star potential.

The dynamic of Lee and Kyle in the movie is another strength of Ganymede, and it’s a direct correlation to how powerful Doww and Castelblanco are in their roles. Their relationship goes through several changes in the movie, from Lee’s barely acknowledging Kyle’s existence, through to their dynamic at the end of the film after all they go through. It’s a believable, heartfelt journey for the characters.

These two young men and the characters they play absolutely lift this movie on their backs and carry it to a strong outing. It was an absolute joy to watch.

+ The directors–Coly Holt and Sam Probst–and the technical coordinators behind the scenes of Ganymede really know how to ratchet up tension. The sound mixing in particular is extremely well-done, as there are several scenes where the audio thumps at you or repeatedly clicks or just pulses so perfectly during the movie’s more high-stakes moments.

It’s such a small thing, but when the audio plays along so beautifully with what the imagery is feeding you, it makes the stressful bits of the movie come even more alive.

– I will confess to having an overall issue with the mood of the movie, as Ganymede doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a horror movie or just a low-stakes relationship drama. It certainly feels more like the latter, but then… why are there scenes of a monster stalking Lee?

As strange as it seems, you could remove the alien being attached to Lee just about entirely, and I’m not entirely sure you wouldn’t have a stronger movie altogether for it. The “horror” scenes of Ganymede just don’t quite fit. Perhaps they are there for the titular aspect of the movie, but at no point did I think Kyle (or some demonic aspect of him) was going to end up being the monster, so it doesn’t work even as a fake-out.

I kind of wish that Holt and Probst had told this story without trying to shoe-horn in a horrific element.

– My next real down is something that would involve either speaking about it very vaguely or going full-on into spoilers (the change of heart one character goes through in the third act), so I’m going to skip out on that. I don’t like spoiling plot details, but talking around the change would just be obnoxious to read.

Instead, I’ll point to how this serious film starring many on-the-rise and relatively unknown actors just happens to co-star… comedy star David Koechner. It’s a strange casting choice that never entirely fit in with the tone of the movie to me.

Now, don’t get me wrong: Koechner does a great job as Lee’s family’s reverend, and his performance never feels out of place. But to me, he’s still too recognizable as a jokey goofster, and I kept waiting for him to… do something funny, I guess? With Castelblanco, Doww, and others really embodying their roles here, every few scenes, I’d get DAVID KOECHNER, and it just kind of took me out of the moment.

And that’s not fair to him for wanting to go against his own grain here. But it’s just a minor, ticky-tacky sort of down.

OVERALL

Ganymede is a great coming-of-age tale of two boys determining who they are. And sometimes there is a monster. It’s such a strange choice; I just can’t get over it. But luckily the two leads are so strong, I can forgive just about anything else, even a third act that starts getting so strange it threatens to take everything off of the rails. In addition to the leads, we have some great technical work and some real expertise behind the camera. This was a joy to watch.