Tickled

A journalist sets out to write about the world of ‘competitive tickling’, and in doing so opens a can of worms.

This documentary captures an utterly bizarre set of events as they unfold. The fact that a competitive tickling championship exits is odd in and of itself but there are weirder fetishes on the internet. It gets truly surreal when the people making the videos threaten the journalists, even going so far as sending lawyers to New Zealand (where Farrier and Reeve are from).

As a response the pair travel to the US to try and find out more, only to uncover a massive ring of exploitation involving the videos.

There’s too much filler here and sometimes the film-making feels a little amateurish (the voice over was surplus to requirements), but Tickled is just too interesting to pass up on. Farrier and Reeve pull and pull on the loose thread and the whole thing unravels.