Spermworld (2024)
dir, Lance Oppenheim
Rated: TV-MA
image: ©2024 FX
A fitting subtitle for director Lance Oppenheim’s Spermworld would be Dispatches from the End of the World. That’s less to do with anyone we meet in the documentary and more an indictment of the entire system. The film explores the unregulated wild west of online sperm donation mainly from the perspective of a few of the men offering up their genetic material.
Their clients are people who want to become parents but who, for myriad reasons, can’t go about it either in the conventional way or even by using established medical options like sperm banks or IVF. The latter options, as you might have guessed, since everything in our society revolves around money, are often prohibitively expensive.
Inspired by a New York Times article by Nellie Bowles – for which Oppenheim contributed reporting – titled “The Sperm Kings Have a Problem: Too Much Demand,” Spermworld is a perplexing, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes uplifting look at a subculture thriving on the margins of society.
Bowles’ January 2021 article has a personal angle. The journalist mentions in passing in the article that, as a 32-year-old who is partnered to a woman, she herself is “in the market for the finest sperm I can get.” (Bowles married her partner, journalist, writer, and editor Bari Weiss in 2021; in 2022, the couple had a daughter.)
For his documentary, Oppenheim also keeps it personal. There is a version of Spermworld that could have focused on a broader survey and history of how we got here and why, but the director eschews all that to focus on three men who, you could argue, compulsively offer up their sperm to any and all takers.
And there are plenty of takers.
Spermworld focuses on the private Facebook group Sperm Donation USA – the NYT article also mentions a rival group named, appropriately if confusingly, USA Sperm Donation – which has over 24,000 members, up from the 11K members cited in the article.
It’s impossible to know if Oppenheim’s small sample size (pun completely intended) of the three donors featured in the film are in any way representative of the whole, but that seems less important to the director than offering up a humanistic slice-of-life portrait.
Over the course of the film’s brief 83 minutes, we meet Tyree, Steve, and Ari. If the number of children each man has sired through sperm donation is to be interpreted as a score, then Ari is the undisputed champion. While Tyree and Steve’s broods can be counted in the single or double digits, Ari is proud to tell anyone who will listen that he is the father of 123 children; by the end of the documentary, 138 is the final tally.
The method for getting the deposit to the client is about as DIY as you can imagine. Either in their homes, hotel rooms, shuttered mall parking lots, or even random public restrooms, the men toddle off to privacy to produce their contribution to the process of baby making. It’s packaged in a syringe before they hand it off to the recipient, so that she can then find her own privacy to complete the process.
One of the most surprising things about this world is that it rarely seems to involve any sex at all, and most donors don’t charge a fee. Oppenheim leads his doc with a sensationalistic opening, showing us a meeting between donor and recipient (neither of whom we see again) who go about the exchange the old-fashioned way, no (man-made) syringes needed.
The main subjects all cite their desire to help people and to pass on their genes as reasons for why they do it. Throughout the film, Oppenheim shows us posts from the Facebook group in which newbies can ask questions or get clarifications. One person asks if it’s normal for a donor to ask for pictures of the recipient’s vagina before the exchange. Multiple responses are curt and clear: “Hell no.”
The most conflict we see in Spermworld comes through Tyree, who has a criminal conviction in his past, and sees donation as a way to be remembered for something other than a mistake he made. His fiancée, Atasha, would like a child of her own, but the couple have been struggling to conceive. There is an unmistakable bitterness in Atasha’s voice when she remarks that the recipients of Tyree’s donations always come first. Oppenheim’s camera holds on Atasha’s face as a single tear runs down her cheek when the couple meet up with one of Tyree’s previous clients and the toddler he fathered through his donation.
Meanwhile, Steve, who is 65 years old, exchanges text messages with Rachel, a prospective client. She is the only client in the documentary with whom we spend a significant amount of time. In her early twenties, Rachel suffers from cystic fibrosis, so she has the extra duty of ensuring that her donor is not a carrier of the rare genetic disorder. Rachel speaks about the risks involved in carrying a child to term, the strain of which her doctors have told her might kill her. Still, to her, it’s a risk worth taking in order for the chance to bring a new life into the world.
A quietly moving exchange comes in the movie when Rachel asks Steve if he would feel guilty if she died as the result of a pregnancy in which he contributed. No, he tells her, he would feel sad, but not guilty. Steve confides to the filmmakers that he finds Rachel attractive and that he wouldn’t mind if a relationship grew out of their arrangement, but that possibility is closed off to him when she makes it clear that she’s not interested. (The pair hang out for movie nights during their once-a-month mission to get Rachel pregnant; their first hang includes a screening of David Lynch’s bonkers Mulholland Dr.)
Oppenheim jettisons the standard talking-head interviews of documentary to create something that feels simultaneously more intimate and contrived than a more conventional approach. He asks his subjects – mostly Steve and Rachel – to read aloud their DM exchanges, which can come across as stilted.
The same is true for the moments in which the director sets up his cameras to capture conversations between people. At times, these moments feel staged, or, at the very least, like the director told his subjects what to talk about before recording. They feel like the packages you see in reality television, when the contestants go home and have “candid” conversations with friends and family that feel about as spontaneous as a dress rehearsal.
The most egregious of these captured conversations happens between Tyree and a friend while they discuss a possibly life-changing outcome of one of Tyree’s donations. Still, Ari Balouzian’s ethereal musical score, as well as Oppenheim’s observational style, make for a surreal viewing experience that frankly doesn’t quite feel like documentary or fiction.
The third subject of Spermworld is Ari, a college professor who works his passion project into lessons on probability. He asks the class to figure out what the odds are of a person’s first five children all being male before telling them that his first five donor children were exactly that.
The quixotic Ari doesn’t have a home. He prefers to save the money he would spend on housing so he can travel to visit as many of his offspring as time allows, sleeping on the couches of his clients. To him, wealth is measured not in terms of a bank account balance – by that standard, he says, he’s poor – but in the love and joy his donations have produced. By that standard, Ari surmises, he’s richer than Elon Musk.
Still, there’s a telling moment, which lasts mere seconds, in which we see Ari using AI to craft an apology letter for missing the birthday of one of his children. Technology has made our lives easier, but tangible human connection seems for many of us to be slipping more and more out of grasp in the modern age. So much so that, for some, fathering 138 children by almost as many partners is the only way to attain that sense of connection.
Ari’s mother, whom we meet when Ari joins his parents for lunch (while also getting documents notarized for his non-US children who want US citizenship), is critical of her son’s lifestyle choices. Ari is not really a father in her eyes, because a father does the hard work of middle-of-the-night feedings and constant supervision of a more traditional family unit.
But in our disconnected world, where environmental, political, and social catastrophe constantly threaten to upend everything, and where predatory capitalism puts the extraction of wealth above all else – sperm banks are referred to in the film by one person as a “money grab” – maybe Ari has it right.
Spermworld is a glimpse into a way of life that would make most people’s heads spin. It’s certainly not for everyone (this critic most definitely included), but there is a bizarre beauty in its depiction of people finding connection and joy in dire circumstances.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Whether or not it makes you uncomfortable — and one can certainly argue that is exactly what Oppenheim is trying to do — Spermworld fascinates with both the outlandish subject matter and the ethereal aesthetics used to tell its story.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I first heard the title Spermworld at SXSW 2024, where Lance Oppenheim spoke during a Q&A after the premiere of another of his projects. Keep your eyes peeled for the limited series Ren Faire — I wrote about the first episode here — which is set to premiere on HBO Max this summer. Described as a “docu-fantasia,” the series, about a succession struggle at the largest renaissance festival in the US, is as strikingly shot and edited as Spermworld. People are already calling Oppenheim the next Errol Morris.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Spermworld is currently streaming on Hulu, which is how I saw it.
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