There’s more than a touch of Louis Theroux to this engrossing documentary — fronted by New Zealander pop-culture journalist David Farrier — about an innocuous-seeming Internet phenomenon: the actually-sinister subculture of “competitive endurance tickling”, in which young men undergo “tickle torture” for money on camera. When Farrier unassumingly requests an interview with an American producer of tickle content, it kickstarts a bizarre campaign of harassment and opens up a rabbit hole of unbelievable twists and turns. The wild places this documentary goes are best left as unspoiled as possible, but it’s no spoiler to say this emerges from its seemingly lighthearted premise as a deeply unnerving story about money, power, sex, and shame in the Internet age.
"A stranger-than-fiction voyage into that cultural abyss known as the internet."
— David Jenkins
"The moviemakers craft a satisfying narrative while leaving the viewer with some questions; this is a movie that manages to be disquieting and entertaining simultaneously."
— Glenn Kenny
Journalist David Farrier stumbles upon a mysterious tickling competition online. As he delves deeper he comes up against fierce resistance, but that doesn’t stop him getting to the bottom of a story stranger than fiction.
A journalist stumbles upon a dark conspiracy when he looks into the secretive world of competitive tickling.
Tickled burrows under the skin almost immediately, from the moment Farrier’s interview request is bizarrely met with a barrage of extreme homophobic abuse by a shady figure in the film’s first few minutes. Farrier and his collaborators attempt to cut through the labyrinthine smoke-and-mirrors tactics used to conceal the dark truth, efforts that wind up feeling a little like divine karma by the time the credits roll. It’s to the film's credit that we not only get that catharsis — thanks to the work of a few other investigative journalists, plus one incredibly lucky find — but also a sober reflection on the social forces that inspired such an elaborate conspiracy to be constructed in the first place.
Really puts the “ick” in “tickle.”
