Pure Vanilla

Pure Vanilla is a Singaporean BL short film, released in 2023 by the independent outfit 250 Films and directed by Mickey Hiah. It runs about nine minutes and went out free on YouTube, where the production also posted a trailer; GagaOOLala carries it as well. It is the first half of a two-part story, completed later the same year by Pure Vanilla: Recipe for Romance.

The setting is a bakery, and almost everything follows from that. Gabriel (Braven Yeo) owns the place. Charlie (Soh Deng Xun) works beside him every day as his assistant. The two are easy in each other's company in the way people become when they share a small space and a fixed routine, and something has plainly grown out of that ease which neither will name while one of them signs the other's wages. The film is content to let that stalemate sit for most of its length.

What breaks it is a visitor. Alex (Leon Koh), a former classmate of Charlie's, arrives for a media interview and changes the arithmetic in the room simply by being in it. Nine minutes does not allow for a slow reveal, so the film uses the intrusion as a shortcut: a third person forces a question the other two have been avoiding, and the ending turns on whether either of them will answer it.

At this length the work sits closer to a sketch than to a drama, and it was evidently made as one. 250 Films returned to the same three actors and the same director for a twenty-two-minute sequel released on 11 November 2023, which picks the couple up where this film leaves them and gives the triangle the room it does not get here. The two are best watched in order and in one sitting; together they come to a little over half an hour.