A priori, any documentary makers should adopt impartiality towards their subjects, but for New Zealander TV reporter David Farrier and producer Dylan Reeve, they have their own skin in the game. The germ of TICKLED is when Farrier, whose bent is on “quirky and odd stories”, is tickled by the online videos of “competitive tickling endurance” and starts blogging it, after met with unexpected homophobic responses and legal threats from the videos’ production company Jane O’Brien Media, Farrier and Reeve are undeterred, if anything, they are further intrigued to beat the bush of this undermined phenomenon and fly to USA to continue their guerrilla probe.

What initially appears as a reportage on the fetish of “erotic tickling”, all the participants of the videos are athletic, teenage or early-twenty-something boys, intriguingly swerves into a conspiracy theory exposé, when the pair obtain more information about the said production company and an 90’s personage called Terri DiSisto, who allegedly spearheaded the video production, through various interviewees, including former participants, reporters and local recruiters, what they piece together is a one-man empire of David D’Amato, the only son of a wealthy Wall Street banker, who invents fake identities to register companies and disburses expense of running them and shooting the videos, all because the guy is minted.

Real life is stranger than fiction, Farrier and Reeve’s investigative modality is nothing special, pedestrian talking heads, voice-only recording sub rosa, occasionally punctuating the narrative with scenic shots, and the key to their triumph can be encapsulated in three operative words “resources, stakeout and chutzpah”, and what is really both unsettling and edifying is to see the deleterious effects of the pandemic bully culture, David is such a fruition, a sadistic tormenter who revels in ruling the roost, and will not have no for an answer, anyone who dares to defy his command is met with inconceivable discrediting retaliation, but how did he do that? Is himself a savvy internet hacker who can disable a university’s computer system (an act of vengeance on a participant who wants out, for which he served a six-month prison sentence) or he outsources the job to someone else, that leaves a question mark, what we can infer is that when one is well-oiled like him, nothing seems to be impossible.

Finally, when most of the lowdown is divulged, TICKLED ends with more reverberations when Farrier calls David’s last relative alive, his stepmother, and we are apprised that David is not a bully in his childhood, instead, allegedly he is a bully victim, that, for this reviewer, is the manna from heaven, while most of us may concern about what damage those bullies can wreak when they grow up, the film intelligently reminds us that the same attention should also be applied to the victims, how their mentality can be forever impaired by the pernicious act and in turn, they comes off as a new bully when they are equipped with the wherewithals, that is food for thought from one side of the story.

referential entries: Tim Wardle’s THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS (2018, 6.6/10); Sandi Tan’s SHIRKERS (2018, 7.4/10).