Film

There’s simply no way to candy-coat this: Zoo is about men who have sex with horses. In 2005, a man was dropped off at a Washington state emergency room, where he died of a perforated colon. The doctors determined that he had engaged in sex with a horse, which unsurprisingly led to a criminal investigation and the media descending on the area like locusts. It quickly became clear that there was a whole group of men who regularly gathered at a ranch to socialize, watch movies and sometimes head out to the barn for sex with the stallions.

Devor starts from the bold choice to tell these men’s stories as sympathetically as possible. Since most of them are understandably reluctant to be filmed, Devor has actors portray them while we hear them talk in voiceover about their lives as “zoos” (short for zoophiles). Listening to these men talk about their lack of connection to people and their deep and often non-sexual sense of connection to animals, we found ourselves toggling between sympathy for these odd, damaged outsiders and the sense that they are justifying with big poetic language the fact that they get off on being fucked by horses. Devor and cinematographer Sean Kirby paint in deep blues and hauntingly lyrical images (we only get a few very brief glimpses of videotapes they made of sexual activity) that, just like the men’s explanations, put an artistic veneer on the raw facts. This doc provides an unsettling if not fully satisfying glimpse into the lives of people on the remotest margins of society.