With his true crime walking tour of Darlinghurst, Matt Bell's The Ex Files shed the usual confines of the comedy club and lamented the modern gay dating scene in the heart of queer Sydney. Will Winter follows Bell through Taylor Square at a gay speed, headphones pulsing, as a tender millennial romance is autopsied in the court of public opinion.
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With his true crime walking tour of Darlinghurst, Matt Bell's The Ex Files shed the usual confines of the comedy club and lamented the modern gay dating scene in the heart of queer Sydney.
Comedy shows don't often start on sidewalk crossings, let alone take you through the streets of Surry Hills wearing chunky headphones, but Matt Bell's The Ex Files sure does.
Performed from the 17th to 19th of September 2026, my friend Ellie and I arrive and crawl around the Pride Village water feature looking for the 'Taylor Square Substation Meeting Spot' (an oxymoron, considering these locations are across the road from each other) before making eye contact with Bell crossing Oxford Street in a shirt bearing the show's title.
After flashing our tickets, he hands us bright red headphones pulsing like a laser tag jacket and switches us into an audio channel with his music and his mic. The show is dubbed a 'walking tour' of Darlinghurst, a silent disco but with a live true crime podcast in lieu of a DJ set.
By the rules of podcasting, Bell declares he 'has a microphone and can prosecute in the court of public opinion.' The crime? His not-quite boyfriend spontaneously left him after several months of dating.
It's a surprisingly solitary show for both performer and audience, and the only voice you can hear is your own or the occasional stray shout of an aggressive local through Bell's microphone. Even though you're surrounded by other attendees, it's a comedy show you laugh at alone, the jokes harboured in headphones.
Something about this feels disjointed, watching open mouths without a sound, but it's also intimate in a way theatre can struggle to achieve. From Bell's first stop, outside Kinselas Hotel recounting a first date followed by 'great sex and rotisserie chicken,' you're living Bell's relationship through his eyes and his footsteps.
When his date admits he's looking to be monogamous, we're just as enthralled by this all-too-rare relationship development for a gay millennial as Bell is. Suddenly we're the ones on Grindr, skipping past the profiles of people measured by height, weight, and metres from your phone, ecstatic that someone else is keen to date and not just fuck.
As someone who frequently plunges the depths of online gay dating, it's such a specific relatability that it's almost painfully funny. For the older (and more heterosexual) sections of the crowd, these jokes seem to fly right past. Bell walks and talks at a gay speed (which is scientifically faster than the average person), and I never lose pace, but some of the crowd lags. I almost feel bad for them. Then I remember we're on a 'comedy true crime walking tour' and Bell calls himself a 'gay comedian' in his bio, so clearly some people didn't do their homework.
We swing past Tucano's tropical bar and hear of a fortuitous tarot reading about their relationship, then stop at THEECA, the restaurant the couple dine at before seeing Wicked 2. They make love that night while singing 'For Good,' and it's the apex of their affair, the kind of sweetness which would be sickly if it wasn't so lovestruck.
The punctuation of our frequent stop-starts lets the romance sink in, and we happily follow Bell, marching at a homosexual pace, around Darlinghurst. I think at first these transitory walks are perfect for chit-chat with my friend, but instead we listen to the 2010s pop music interludes and really deliberate the evidence presented to us as jury.
We finally land back at the Substation heartbroken, the relationship unravelled by a no-show at a restaurant followed by an abysmal break-up text. It's cutting and unexpected, but Bell's mood brightens when he realises the story is perfect comedy show material.
In a digital post-breakup autopsy, he stalks his ex's socials and discovers the circumstances of their sudden end: the return of a long-term partner. Now, after whipping through the wild west of queer Sydney and learning all of the evidence, Bell asks us the dreaded question: guilty, or not?
I expect for a moment we'll all take our headphones off and discuss, a true jury of peers, that extra slice of reality which you can't get from a recorded podcast, but instead he ends the show by comically doxxing his ex and the new (old) partner.
The irresolution is an ethically murky but morally righteous punchline to linger on, a reminder that the Melbourne-based Bell likely transplanted the relationship onto convenient landmarks that match the ebbs and flows of the real story. Breaking through that subtext means acknowledging the truth behind the show, and for a moment I feel like I've invaded the privacy of these two souls for the brief moment they loved each other.
Then I look at the charismatic, creative, and consuming storyteller who's just trusted us with his love, I think of how his sweet heart was broken by a pathetic text, and the oversharing feels deserved.
Is that not how all true crime makes you feel? Overconfident, overinvested, and parasocially entertained. It's an exceptional use of the genre, and Bell's understanding of its rhythms in writing and in performance is masterful.
We turn off our headphones, put them in a tote bag, then tune back into the real world. I wonder what the patrons of the restaurants and bars we passed think we were up to for the last hour.
I imagine them conspiring over dinner about this huddle of people with flashing ears outside their window, giggling at a very tall and animated queer comedy messiah. Then I realise I don't particularly care what they thought: this was our story to live, not theirs.
Now, off with his ex's head!
Reviewed by Will Winter.
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