One problem is the screenplay's omissions. We rarely get a sense of the frat house in relation to the campus and the community that surrounds it; this helps to cement a slightly dreamy atmosphere and intensify the action (they might as well be on a desert island like the kids in "Lord of the Flies") but it also deprives us of a sense of the world beyond the fraternity house, so we naturally end up wanting Brad to get through initiation and prove himself to Brett and the other brothers. This approach also contributes to the sense that the brothers and pledges are willingly entering into a world largely devoid of women, which feels true to the reality of Greek life inside a frat house; but the film pays scant attention to women as anything other than random sex partners, girlfriends and background color (the hero enjoys one brief kiss with a former high school crush who pretty much vanishes from the story after that), so the film's perspective ends up endorsing the values that it seems, in the abstract anyway, to want to critique. Also missing in action are parents, whose alternately disapproving and celebratory perspective on the traditions of Greek life might've added ballast to the film.

A larger problem is the hero's specific predicament. While it's definitely a bad idea for a young man to pledge to a fraternity shortly after surviving a beating, it's probably not a good idea to do anything else that's physically demanding and psychologically grueling, either, especially if it involves sensory deprivation or being yelled at or pushed around. Whether Brad would've gotten through Hell Week without a hitch had he pledged a couple of years later, after he'd had time to process his mugging, is a question the movie never thinks to asks. When I was in college I had a slightly older friend who pledged to a different fraternity after being discharged from the Army, and he got through it fine, because after what he'd been through in the military, the college campus facsimile seemed like a joke. During a  sensory deprivation exercise where his pledge class sat with hoods over their heads in the dark for three hours while music blasted at earsplitting volume, he took a nice, long nap. That anecdote isn't offered to minimize any of the behavior depicted in "Goat," only to suggest that the inappropriateness of Brad's decision to pledge often seems like a matter of bad timing here, which surely wasn't the point.

There's still a lot to chew on after seeing "Goat"—in particular the question of why organizations that are essentially incubators for the most retrograde ideas about manhood are still allowed to exist at institutions theoretically dedicated to enlightenment—but any discussion of toxic masculinity, or the ways in which brotherhood in all its forms can get twisted, is likely to be muted by second-guessing of the movie's methods.

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