Movie Review: CUSTOM

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: August 23rd, 2025 / 03:18 AM

CUSTOM movie poster | ©2025 The Movie Partnership

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Abigail Hardingham, Rowan Polonski, Brad Moore, Samantha Steel, Jon M. Chandler
Writer: Tiago Teixeira
Director: Tiago Teixeira
Distributor: The Movie Partnership
Release Date: August 19, 2025 (VOD, digital)

The title of CUSTOM has two meanings here. The first is commercial, as in made to order. The second refers to ritual.

Young working-class English couple Harriet (Abigail Hardingham) and Jasper (Rowan Polonski) are expanding their professional horizons. She’s a photographer, he’s a videographer, and they met in an arts collective.

However, their income has left something to be desired, so – using the stage names Flower and Snake – Harriet and Jasper are entering the world of adult video on demand with their webcam.

They both experience the work as mundane soon enough. Both of them do drugs to quash the ennui. Then their “agent” Bishop (Brad Moore), who has a thing for gory religious iconography, finds them a client who offers 10K per scene.

The client (Jon M. Chandler) has some conditions, including insisting that the scenes be shot on videotape, which has a physical imprint (unlike digital). He also demands that no one except him watches the tapes, a command that Jasper disobeys almost immediately.

The first tape shows Jasper and Harriet engaging in actions, at first innocuous, that neither of them can remember. Jasper is concerned about this; Harriet is not.

Writer/director Tiago Teixeira has a dark, quiet aesthetic that suggests danger at every step. He also finds cinematic uses for videotape – not as simply a medium, but as impactful set dressing – that is innovative and suitably creepy. As CUSTOM is all interiors, Teixeira succeeds at creating a sense of artificiality and surrealism that serves the mood well.

The problem with CUSTOM is not so much that we can guess where this is going. That’s clear when we hear (early on) that the sessions have the couple playing an audiotape with arcane chanting on it to accompany what they’re doing.

Instead, it’s that CUSTOM takes what feels like forever for events to move along. Even though CUSTOM clocks in at a comparatively brief one hour and seventeen minutes, unless one is transfixed by the sex acts (fairly graphic for a film that’s not strictly adult product), it goes by slowly.

Although Harriet and Jasper have artistic careers, and Harriet has hopes for a potential showing of her photos, we don’t find out a lot about what drives either of them. We’re also not sure about what keeps them together, since they don’t show much affection or even physical preoccupation with each other outside of their custom gigs.

When Jasper starts investigating what this is all about, he’s mostly watching playback, which isn’t especially dynamic.

This is not the fault of Hardingham and Polonski, who seem fearless in enacting all that is asked of them.

CUSTOM blends the erotic and the occult with a singular sensibility. It’s unique, just not very gripping.

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Slow-moving meld of adult filmmaking and the occult

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Article: Movie Review: CUSTOM

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