Author: gffreviews

Hold onto your seat because this is the film you’ve all been waiting for, a movie about an English DJ in Spain who falls for his manic pixie dream girl. She dies, so he takes an experimental drug to allow him to have lucid dreams where he can be with her. It’s an after-life rom-com.

This movie is like Jessica Jones season 1, but if Kilgrave was the main character and didn’t realise he was a villain. It’s like no one making the film understood that a guy who has god-like powers to shape reality, whose continued interest in you is literally the only thing keeping you from oblivion, and who, if you start to show your own sentience, will literally delete emotions and memories from you, is the stuff of women’s nightmares. This guy is a monster.

It is really hard to talk about the characters in this movie, because there is really only one character in this movie, the main guy, Nicolas. You never actually meet Daniela. She is only shown as a smiling, glowing memory that makes him feel good about himself, and then as his projection of something to fulfil his desires in his dreams. Who she actually is without him is something we never see, and the writer doesn’t think is important to show.

There are secondary characters who pop in and out to help Nicolas with his problems, but like Daniela, they are just there to serve his drives. This is true across everyone and everything, both in his waking and dream worlds, until even his wildest dreams of constant and immediate wish-fulfillment start to dissatisfy him. What I took away from the film was how profoundly lonely and empty it is to see yourself as the only real person, and other people as only existing as tools for you to use to fulfil your wants and needs.

Nicolas doesn’t use the drug as directed, instead spending longer and longer in the dreamworld with Daniela, until Daniela eventually gains true sentience. Whereupon she starts to annoy, bore or defy him, so he just speeds up, skips or deletes her inconvenient self-expressions. And the film conveys none of the horror of that, or suggests that there might be anything morally questionable about Nicolas’s actions. At one point, Daniela tries to leave him for her ex, and he fully deletes the memory of her ex from her, and commands her to love only him.

Having said my piece about all that, what else is there to say about this film? The writing is bad, the dialogue is constantly stating the obvious, and then repeating it several times, as though it thinks the audience is too stupid to keep up. The main character takes so fucking long to work out what is happening with the lucid dreaming stuff, I mean it’s the premise of the movie and it takes ages to get going. There are parts that are supposed to funny and just aren’t.

I think the main lead doesn’t help. I spent the first half-hour wondering if the writing was bad or he was just bad, but the answer is both. He is hair-pullingly melodramatic, daytime soap opera levels of reactions. When he’s not doing that, if the scene doesn’t have a dramatic incident, he is flat, looking like he’s lost interest in what’s going on as much as I have.

If you are looking for a film at the festival that shows people dealing with grief and retreating into their own psyche, watch My Dead Friend Zoe. If you wanna see a movie about how to process trauma, move on and change and grow, don’t watch this film, because the main character doesn’t really do any of that.

I am aware this has been a particularly bitchy review on my part, but if I have an excuse, it’s the narcissism that runs through this movie like a stick of rock.

What a rollercoaster!

The Luckiest Man in America is about a guy who goes on a morning game show and becomes the record-breaking biggest winner in the show’s history. Going into the film, I was like, sounds interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s enough drama for a full movie. Oh, it’s plenty of drama, enough and more.

Michael Larson shows up for auditions to his favourite morning quiz show. My sympathy was with him instantly, because on sight I was like, oh, this guy’s autistic af. My wee heart went out to him, standing in a tshirt and shorts looking as uncomfortable as all get-out, and all these slick casting executives laughing up their sleeves at his honest sincerity and over-eager enthusiasm for the show. It was the 80s too, so all anybody understands him as is ‘off’.

They tell him to come back the next day in a smart jacket with a trimmed beard and combed hair. So he does come back the next day with a trimmed beard, combed hair and smart jacket . . . and the same shorts. My auty from another hotty, I see you.

What the film does really well is keep you off-balance with Michael himself. The executives start scrambling as the numbers he’s winning just keep racking up, and they start digging into who exactly this guy is. He says he’s a down-on-his-luck middle-aged ice cream truck driver with a wife and kids at home, but is everything as above-board as he’s painting it? Is he cheating somehow? Is he a scammer?

The film does an excellent of job of keeping you guessing through the twists and turns of the story, as those who hold the purse strings scramble to manage the unstoppable train of Michael’s wins. Just a really well-told little tale.

This film starts with the burning of a barn and ends with the burning of a world.

This is being billed as a folk horror and it’s not. It’s a kitchen sink drama. At the end of harvest, a fire burns down the barn of the benevolent landowner. Master Kent, played by Harry Melling, has gone half-native in this idyllic Scottish village. Even his own manservant, Walt, played by the redoubtable Caleb Landry Jones, has married a local woman and now tills the soil. The breaking apart of their little haven takes place over the course of a week.

The morning after the burning, they come across 3 strangers of their land, darker-skinned and foreign. The villagers fall upon them and put the two men in the stocks and shear the woman’s hair. But is the enemy these outsiders? Or is the enemy among them?

Spoilers! *drumroll* The enemy is the class system.

Caleb Landry Jones gives, as always, a really solid performance, but this film is too long, and feels full of stuffing. There is a lot of dancing around the point, in a way that just felt totally unnecessary and added nothing.

Okay, some ground rules for going into this movie. It is about a U.S. veteran, so it is set firmly in the American unquestioned, unchallenged veneration of the military. So no asking obvious questions beyond the frame in which this story is told. Once you accept those ground rules, this is actually a solidly good movie about trauma and grief.

Sonequa Martin-Green and Natalie Morales make this movie by building a truly believable friendship at its heart. Sonequa plays Merit, middle-class and hoping to go to college after serving. Natalie plays Zoe, someone with no money, prospects, or support system on the outside. The friendship they form while deployed in Afghanistan together is one of the best things in each other’s lives. The two leads instantly gel on screen, they bicker and banter and get in one another’s space, they are so comfortable together. The writing and their performances leave you with a clear impression of the depth of care, trust and love they have.

But the movie’s not called My Friend Zoe, it’s called My Dead Friend Zoe. The film begins with Merit struggling with life after the military, doing court-appointed group therapy for PTSD, which she is not engaging with at all. She is haunted by Zoe, who is her constant companion, making wise cracks, and taking the piss out the therapy group. The film shows beautifully the retreat into grief, the self-isolation and unwillingness to move on, because while you don’t, you get to hold them close a little longer.

Merit’s guilt at surviving is palpable, and that’s why I think this film is so easily identifiable, all the military stuff aside. Because once they are dead, everybody acts like it was inevitable, unavoidable, and they will tell you it wasn’t your fault. But they weren’t there and they don’t know, and in the time before, there were lots of ways it could have gone and lots of things you could have done, and you know that if you had done things differently, things would be different. Merit’s reaction to well-worn advice is so recognisable, we are all so used to the same handful of platitudes, and you can hear how it wasn’t your fault a hundred times, but it means nothing until you actually believe it.

I’m making this film sound like a dirge of misery and it’s actually not. The journey Merit goes on is one of reconnecting with her family and becoming open to the possibility of making new relationships, but it is kept in constant flux with the urge to hold onto this beautiful thing from the past and live there instead of the present. And Zoe is fun, you get why you would try to keep her ghost for as long as possible.

It’s because Zoe and Merit’s friendship is so warm and fun that the ending hits so hard. Zoe’s death is an established fact, and Merit’s trauma over it has been explored, that by the end you think everything has been telegraphed so completely, it couldn’t possibly be the gut punch that it in fact delivers. I was crying. It’s very moving, and very identifiable. Genuinely a very good movie about grief.