We often linger in the ruins of a self before we confront the problem. Even when we recognize it, we repeat patterns and acclimate to depression. We numb ourselves. In Keep Coming Back, Gabriel (Nekkomato) has overcome addiction. It is his one-year anniversary of sobriety. However, something continues to weigh him down—anhedonia. He struggles to enjoy what was once pleasurable, even intimacy. He has not had sex in ages. The milestone is fragile.
Then, while friends are coming over for a celebration, a crisis forces him to see plainly. The past is still haunting him, and though he tries to push them away at first, his friends make it apparent. Gabriel has been living with his grief for far too long. Keep Coming Back is not a simple story about sobriety. It is about what remains when the ways a person learned to desire, socialize, and survive are gone. Additionally, it is one I know intimately.
“Sobriety reveals everything that had been numbed.”
Becoming sober recently was a profound upheaval in my life. I had to completely rediscover myself—new patterns and ways of being—and there has been a constant pressure to collapse into the past. Additionally, sobriety does not always arrive as relief at first. Sometimes sobriety reveals everything that had been numbed. The revelation can be brutal. In Gabriel’s case, it is unresolved. The seed of the story was an imagined dinner where the host of a party refuses to let his guests enter when they arrive. Then, Keep Coming Back evolved through conversations with collaborators. The initial idea for Gabriel’s character developed a darker understory.
Additionally, we integrated the emotional drama, gave life to the characters, and infused the story with a touch of psychological thrill. Similar to our work in The Mirror, we tackled numerous challenges while creating a story that lives and breathes Gabriel’s vulnerability. The tension in the film emerges from the friends’ uninterrupted lives of desire and fulfillment in contrast to Gabriel’s emotional paralysis. Sex does not suspend the drama; it pushes it forward. There is a storm of contradictory emotional states. From pride to grief, and guilt to the need for connection, there is a profound disquiet Gabriel must resolve.
“Sometimes we need to withdraw to hear our own voice clearly.”
He could just return to substance abuse. Alcohol and chemsex are always easy solutions to numb the pain. Alternatively, he could just capitulate into his friends’ worlds without addressing the problem and attending to his inner need for healing. Indeed, Keep Coming Back touches on the way that friends and community hold us together, but also impinge upon our self development. Sometimes we need to withdraw to hear our own voice clearly.
Keep Coming Back exudes the difficulties of moving on and becoming whole amidst sobriety and in the wake of loss. Neither is easy, and neither is clean cut. That is the crux and charm of exploring Gabriel’s arc gradually, with attention and care.
I am not interested in simple, morally exemplary characters, but in people burdened by the complexities and contradictions of reality. Additionally, I am searching for the hidden monster, that pathetic insect inside each of us that cinema often obscures. As such, Keep Coming Back explores the dynamics of power, attraction, submission, and adaptation between people who are deeply drawn to one another.
Michel (FRAN) is profoundly in love with Gabriel, but Gabriel does not know whether he is ready to take the next step with him. Meanwhile, Gabriel’s best friend Marcelo (Panterino) has a relationship with Paulo shaped by obsession and emotional submission. On the other hand, Paulo (P.Aries) becomes a medium, an interfering force within the story. He enters Gabriel’s process of collapse and transformation in ways that help and disturb it. Lastly, Gabriel’s late partner Christian (XrisBoy) might be the most complex presence in the film. Despite his absence, his troubled soul still haunts and structures Gabriel’s emotions.
The trilogy form allows us to explore these emotional depths and dramas more ambitiously. Instead of condensing everything into a short film shot in one or two days, we have built a more layered emotional progression across several chapters. It also provided more room for character development, delayed revelations, and a more complex dramatic architecture. As such, Keep Coming Back represents a clear step forward for Bedtime Stories in terms of cinematic development, narrative scale, and psychological complexity.
The first chapter opens the wound while the following episodes allow us to understand what lies beneath Gabriel’s guilt. I am also excited about the final episode reframing what the viewer thinks they understand about Gabriel. Beyond a deeper elucidation of character, we have also had the fortune of applying a more artful touch to storytelling.
As such, the film expands the scope of stories that can exist within queer erotic cinema. In Keep Coming Back, the apartment is intimate, and it also becomes a pressure chamber where grief, desire, and the past accumulate. We tell a story with morally complicated characters and real psychological development. In doing so, we have been able to create space for authentic life and love as well as magic realism and thrill imbued with erotic truth.
Ultimately, sobriety is not a final achievement. It is an unstable process of reconstruction. Keep Coming Back explores Gabriel’s struggle and we grounded the film in the real challenges of reconstituting oneself through the process. In doing so, we were attentive to the way that life changes often destabilize and dull our inner worlds sometimes for years, while life goes on for others. We are excited to share it with you and grateful to have you on this cinematic journey with us. Please enjoy!
Keep Coming Back Episode 1: A Year of Sobriety Is Available to Stream
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