The notorious case of Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb—two young, gay University of Chicago students whose 1924 thrill-killing of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks captured headlines as the “crime of the century”—is daringly reimagined in Tom Kalin’s subversive New Queer Cinema touchstone. Smart, coolly stylized, and emotionally jarring, SWOON employs haunting black-and-white visuals and experimental narrative techniques to explore the social, judicial, and psychological forces that acted upon these two lives.
