re(Assignment) is this year's 'what were they thinking?' film

But is it misjudged transphobia, or a knowing cultural comment?

Every year one film emerges from the festivals that so completely misreads the tone of the era that you have to wonder if anyone involved in the production has even every visited Twitter.com. In 2016 that film is (re)Assignment.

Premiering at Toronto Film Festival this week and starring Michelle Rodriguez, it centres on a hitman who is forcibly given a revenge sex change.

“What happened to me… I guess it was a lot better than what I deserved,” protagonist Frank Kitchen says, I like to imagine in voiceover while taking a drag on a cigarette in a cocktail dress.

re(Assignment) has already faced backlash over its casting of a female actress in a trans role, and things are about to get a whole lot worse for it when it is made available for public viewing.

Of course, not every film involving trans topics needs to be incredibly worthy and pandering and emotional, but by all accounts its nothing short of transphobic, with Vulture describing it as “about as woke as a coma”.

Almodovar managed to make forced gender reassignment work in The Skin I Live In, but re(Assignment) is a hardboiled crime thriller not a nuanced drama, with Variety describing its “Oh no! I’m a chick now! narrative hook as “unintentionally funny”.

For those who are able to look beyond their own outrage, re(Assignment) could, in fact, enter the realms of disasterpiece.

Pre-operation, Rodriguez apparently sports laughably low budget facial hair and chest rug, and there is a scene in which hitman Frank Kitchen’s (that’s genuinely his name by the way) dick swings pendulum-like toward the camera after he exits the shower, just to really hammer the gender thing home.

But maybe the whole thing is actually completely knowing? The Hollywood Reporter thinks so, describing it as a “deliciously transgressive and smart classic B movie”.

(Re)Assignment is, by any objective standard, a disreputable slice of bloody sleaze,” critic Todd McCarthy writes. “But there’s also no question that veteran director and co-writer Walter Hill knows exactly what he’s doing here, wading waist-deep into Frank Miller Sin City territory and using genre tropes to explore some provocatively, even outrageously transgressive propositions.

“The somber tone and low-end production values may not be exactly in tune with young neo-noir enthusiasts, but more seasoned fans of the genre and the filmmaker will recognize and embrace Hill’s use of noir to play with and comment on topical issues in a deliciously subversive way, political correctness be damned.”

You can decide for yourself in 2017, though re(Assignment) has yet to be given a release date.