Set against the backdrop of a world ravaged by global warming where the water levels are rising and the last remaining polar bear not in captivity has just died, Cthulhu tells the tale of a gay man forced to return to the small town and family he escaped to settle the estate of his recently deceased mother. While grappling with the returning surge of painful memories and contentious interactions with his surviving parent, he stumbles upon the twisted machinations of a cult getting ready to awaken their slumbering god. In suitably Lovecraftian fashion, Cthulhu's return is an inevitability in this movie. An event inked into the script that none of its characters can avoid. As a result, the hero's quest isn't to prevent the coming destruction. He'll spend the entire runtime just as confused by the local's cryptic ramblings or warnings and the moments both horrific and supernatural as you'll be (particularly if you're unfamiliar with the mythos' lore). No, his journey is set to take him to the final instance before what's left of humanity is engulfed by madness where he must make a choice to either stay true to himself and who he loves, or embrace his cursed lineage and relent to his bigoted, religious zealot father's last attempt to bring him into the fold before the end of everything. The writing duo of Grant Cogswell and Dan Gildark approach their allegory for homophobia from a unique angle that I haven't seen taken before in what little queer cinema I'm familiar with. Being based on the part hereditary horror The Shadow over Innsmouth, themes of procreation and conception take center stage. Every step on the lead's path to his ultimate destiny is plagued by attacks on his perceived inability and, more accurately in his case due to surrogacy being a thing, lack of desire to produce a biological offspring. Usually in the form of twisted visions brought about by a cosmic entity depicting nightmares like children trapped in metal cages on beaches, screaming with their arms sticking out of the holes in the sides as the tide slowly rolls in to take them away forever. There's a moment near the end of the film that has many possible meanings. One of which I can't get into for fear of pretty significant spoilers. In it though the protagonist's father asks him, "would you like to see your children?" He then proceeds to lead him to a bathtub filled with blood and something even more horrifying that we don't get shown, but what I think is the patriarch's demented manifestation of what he believes are the grandchildren his son could have given him, but now never can as he spilt his seed in sex with another man. Something symbolized in an earlier flashback that shows him masturbating under a pier into the water with his childhood lover as they recite the names girls they go to school with or attractive actresses neither of them actually want to sleep with in an effort to share some sort of sexual intimacy while still maintaining a thin illusion of straightness before either was brave enough to come out to the other. One thing that becomes abundantly clear while watching is that everyone involved cared deeply about this project. Some were even invested enough to make themselves homeless financing it. I see a lot of people complain about the acting or budgetary constraints though. Criticisms I feel are wildly overblown. Naturally scenery is used to create some beautiful shots and the performances are far better than I was led to believe going into this. Simply put, The Room this ain't. What I believe they actually have a problem with, but don't know how to express is the script. An issue typical of many Lovecraft-derived films is that they're often made by author's fans, for the author's fans and tend to assume viewers have prior knowledge about how the universe he created operates as a result. Cthulhu is by far the worst offender of this line of thought that I've seen to date. It's filled with surreal, inexplicable, or just plain unexplained occurrences in a manner not dissimilar to the very open to interpretation Jacob's Ladder that will leave the previously initiated scratching their heads, much less the unacquainted. Essentially, this is as close a Lovecraft flick has come to being Silent Hill (the game, not the movie). While it can and definitely will leave you feeling lost at points, this will be an absolute treat for those with an appreciation for hellish dreamscape horror and serves as the perfect example of the genre's ability to delve into complex real-world struggles in thoughtful ways. The lore of the Cthulhu mythos is so tightly entwined with the plot's subtextual exploration of the specific aforementioned aspect of the wide-ranging discrimination the homosexual community faces that you couldn't just swap out the fictional religion presented here with any actual one and get quite the same results, making it the most creative and unique cinematic usages of the source material that I've come across thus far. After all this time the creators have naturally moved past the belief this could still make them money when it couldn't even recoup the costs it took to make it when it released, so the director himself actually uploaded the entire film on YouTube for free back in 2018. Providing an easy means of viewing a work of legitimate quality right from the minds of passionate people, and I highly recommend doing so.