This short announces its ambitions loudly and unapologetically. Conceived as a proof of concept for a feature, it throws us into a neon-lit penthouse with a male who looks carved out of marble. Adam, played by Jon Cor, is absurdly handsome, with a sculpted, camera-loving body. The film frames it both like a weapon and like a spectacle. His wife is pregnant, and he promises this will be his final night on the job – one last performance before domestic responsibility replaces glitter and g-strings.

At first, however, the film kept us guessing. Adam spoke about a “mission” he needs to complete. He prepares with focus and ritual precision. Is he a stripper, or is he a hitman? The ambiguity is intentional and rather effective. The early scenes flirt with thriller tropes, teasing the possibility that we are watching a professional killer gearing up for an assignment. Only gradually does the truth reveal itself: Adam is indeed a high-end male dancer hired for private parties. Yet even once that is clear, the film refuses to stay in a single genre lane.

When Adam enters what he believes to be a hotel suite full of eager partygoers, he instead finds himself face to face with gangsters – straight out of a Guy Ritchie caper. From there, the second half becomes an acrobatic brawl in which Adam’s dancer’s body turns into a combat machine. Dildos, handcuffs, and assorted sex toys are repurposed as weapons. Lorber reframes striptease as duel, choreography as combat. The stage becomes an arena; the lap dance morphs into a survival tactic.

It is not an entirely fresh idea. The notion of fight-as-dance has been circulating for years, and in Joshua Jadi’s Austrian short Stuporia (2025), a street fight is explicitly staged as a dance because its protagonist is a dancer. The air seems thick with this metaphor. Still, Lorber leans into it with flamboyant confidence. His tone is knowingly excessive, almost cartoonish, and often very funny.

What makes the film more interesting than its premise alone is its playful engagement with masculinity and queerness. Adam, who lives happily with his pregnant wife, becomes a curious agent of queerness within a hyper-heteronormative gangster setup. The antagonists – who are also his accidental “clients” – embody a brittle, performative machismo. They posture, threaten, and bark orders, yet it is Adam’s glittering physicality that ultimately dominates the space. Lorber seems to be gently mocking the rigidity of straight male codes, suggesting that masculinity itself is always a performance – sometimes literal, sometimes lethal.

Visually, the film embraces kitsch. Close-ups of various [arts of the body, pounding music, and aggressively intimate camerawork amplify both sweat and absurdity. The tone wobbles on the edge of parody, but that instability is part of the charm. The film’s awareness of its ridiculousness helps to carry it through its brief duration of 23 minutes.

As a proof of concept, Legend Has It succeeds in . It may not reinvent the action-comedy genre, and its central metaphor is not remarkably groundbreaking. On the other hand, it delivers spectacle. The protagonist is so strikingly beautiful that he becomes both an icon and a punchline.

It is kitschy, excessive, and proudly over-the-top – the kind of film you describe with a shrug and a grin: so bad it is actually good.

Legend Has It premiered in the Sapporo International Short Film Festival 2025.