Tickled (2016)

When it was all over, I turned to my friend and asked “Was that for real?”  If you see the movie, then you’ll be just as skeptical as I was.  You keep telling yourself that since this is a documentary that you want to believe that what you’re seeing is true.  Much like Catfish, you hope that by the end you’ll discover

David Farrier’s film Tickled begins with an idea that might make for a fun indie distraction.  He’s a pop culture journalist who specializes in those human-interest stories that use to close out your local news and during a deep dive into internet culture discovered “competitive endurance tickling,” a subculture of men who engage in a competition to have their feet shackled and then be tickled unmercifully.  Okay, this doesn’t sound too far-fetched.  In fact, it sounds like exactly the kind of thing that makes the internet such a baffling circus.  But what happened next, made me wonder.

Farrier, reasonably, delved into this culture to find out about the people involved; after all, he is a journalist.  Who are these men?  Why do they engage in this practice?  But much to his amazement (and ours) he found a bitter resistance.  The company that makes the videos not only rejected his request but also began harassing him and threatening him.

I don’t want to give away any more but I’ll just say that this is a movie that starts with a cute and intriguing idea and then spirals down a very dark labyrinth that will make you reasonably skeptical.  I was, and was surprised to find that, no, this is all-too-real.