In the opening shot of the 14-minute Australian short Crossbow, the camera trains on a sullen teenaged boy (Cy Standen) sitting on his bed, bombarded by the sounds of his parents (Lisa Chappell and Joel Edgerton) having sex. But while this auditory onslaught torments the son, it turns on the adolescent boy next door, who narrates the film. All he can think about is his base desire for the vocal and eternally panty-clad mother in the neighboring house, even after she suffers a harrowing tragedy.

“There were a couple of people who had said that the film was misogynist,” said filmmaker David Michôd. “I think it’s possibly in part that they think it’s a film that privileges the neighbor’s adolescent perspective over the mother’s, that she is in effect in the film an object of sexual desire. But at the same time, the most passionate and high-profile supporters of the film have all been women, which eases that blow a little bit. And I think they just appreciate its honesty about the way the adolescent male sexual brain works: that it doesn’t stop even in the face of unpleasant or inappropriate situations. We are basically just animals with animal instincts.”

The film’s narration, written and delivered by Michôd, reflects a writing craft honed during many years spent not making films. After earning a humanities undergraduate degree from the University of Melbourne and suffering the doldrums of a job at the Department of Education, Michôd attended film school at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. “I realized that if I didn’t choose a career that some career was going to choose me,” he said. He then spent a few years editing a magazine called Inside Film in Sydney before finally taking the leap of faith required to pursue filmmaking full-time.

To compound his risk, he decided to make a film with a child as a central character and to cast a non-actor in that role. “He doesn’t actually have any dialogue in the film, but there are some quite strong moments that he needs to be able to hold with his face,” said Michôd. “When I was doing auditions, what I expected would happen happened, which is that literally 99 percent of the kids who came into the room were little singing and dancing drama school kids who just weren’t right at all. And this one kid came in because his mom was desperate for him to find something he was interested in because he was skipping school and mixing with the wrong crowd. And he came into the audition, and he just had attitude. And his face was that face that I wanted.”

Crossbow’s controversial reception has made Michôd feel lucky that the film was financed in the first place. For his next project, he plans to make a sweeter, gentler short about a hearing-impaired kid who wants a rabbit. “I very deliberately set out to make something that my grandma could watch, because my mom won’t let me show Crossbow to my grandma,” he said. “And I started to wonder what it was in me that made me want to make something like Crossbow. I actually found it a little bit disturbing myself.”