Tick­led

To best expe­ri­ence the plea­sures of David Far­ri­er and Dylan Reeve’s dis­qui­et­ing doc­u­men­tary, Tick­led, you’d prob­a­bly do best to read as lit­tle about it as pos­si­ble. From the out­set it appears to be a colour­ful, sil­ly-sea­son inves­ti­ga­tion into the fringe ​“sport” of com­pet­i­tive tick­ling. Dis­cov­ered by Far­ri­er dur­ing one of his reg­u­lar click voy­ages in search of new mate­r­i­al, an appar­ent­ly inno­cent web video depicts young, ripped, enthu­si­as­tic men (always men) in brand­ed sport­ing duds, man­a­cled to a padded mat and then, for around an hour, tick­ling one another.

The footage is nev­er explic­it, and the com­pe­ti­tion ele­ment is left wor­ry­ing­ly vague. The catch is, the com­pa­ny pump­ing out these videos offers first class flights to LA, plush accom­mo­da­tion upon arrival and a fat per diem for poten­tial con­tes­tants. Far­ri­er pokes his head down the rab­bit hole think­ing he’ll find noth­ing more than a Fri­day fun­ny for his local Auck­land info­tain­ment TV gig, but the foul and threat­en­ing response he receives from a pub­li­cist at Jane O’Brien Media (pro­duc­ers of the videos) leads him to sus­pect that there’s more to this sto­ry than meets the eye.

At one point near the clos­ing chap­ter of the film, Far­ri­er says in his voiceover nar­ra­tion, “…and then things got real­ly weird”. He could’ve quite eas­i­ly done with drop­ping this phrase four or five time dur­ing the film, as he and part­ner Reeve’s dogged tenac­i­ty to keep on despite all the daunt­ing obsta­cles that lit­ter their onward path is what the film is all about. With­out giv­ing too much away, Tick­led is less about tick­ling, and more about the sim­ple act of find­ing out who has made a video of men tick­ling each oth­er, and why.

It’s a supreme­ly com­pelling sto­ry, even if it peters out some­what in its rushed, indel­i­cate final stages. Far­ri­er, too, does the film no favours by try­ing to sum­marise what the film is real­ly ​“about” in his sign-off, sug­gest­ing that he may not ful­ly com­pre­hend the rich­ness of his own mate­r­i­al. Even so, it real­ly is a fun­ny one.