Movie Review: Disconnect

Disconnect
Directed by: Henry Alex Rubin.
Written by: Andrew Stern.
Starring: Jason Bateman (Rich Boyd), Hope Davis (Lydia Boyd), Frank Grillo (Mike Dixon), Michael Nyqvist (Stephen Schumacher), Paula Patton (Cindy Hull), Andrea Riseborough (Nina Dunham), Alexander Skarsgård (Derek Hull), Max Thieriot (Kyle), Colin Ford (Jason Dixon), Jonah Bobo (Ben Boyd), Haley Ramm (Abby Boyd), Norbert Leo Butz (Peter), Kasi Lemmons (Roberta Washington), John Sharian (Ross Lynd), Aviad Bernstein (Frye).

Disconnect is the type of bad movie that happens whenever filmmakers are more interested in making a larger point about society than they are in grounding their story in things such as plot and character. Some have described Disconnect as doing for computers and the internet what Paul Haggis’ Oscar winning Crash did for racism. The comparison is not unfair – but as flawed as Haggis’ film was, it was still a decent film, anchored by some excellent performances. The entirety of Disconnect plays like the worst moments of Crash – where Haggis lays on his points that everyone is racist way too thickly for them to seem believable.

The film tells three separate stories (that sometimes overlap) about people whose lives are destroyed by the internet. The best involves a teenage loner, Ben (Jonah Bobo) who makes the innocent mistake of pissing off two classmates – Jason (Colin Ford) and Frye (Aviad Bernstein). They decide to play a cruel joke on Ben, by inventing a girl and chatting with him online – eventually escalating things by sending him a naked picture, and asking for one in return – which he unwisely does, resulting in predictably horribly things to happen. This is when Ben’s father Rich (Jason Bateman) starts looking into what happened – and realizing he didn’t really know his own son.

The second story involves Nina Dunam (Andrea Riseborough) as an enterprising local reporter, tired of doing fluff pieces, who decides she wants to expose the seedy underbelly of porn chat rooms. She goes online, and befriends the sweetly dim Kyle (Max Thieriot), who is amazed that she doesn’t want him to do anything sexual – just to talk. She crosses ethical guidelines that even a novice journalist would understand you shouldn’t cross, but she gets the story she is after. But once again, this has disastrous results for all involved.

Then there’s the story of Derek and Cindy (Alexander Skarsgard and Paula Patton) as a married couple still reeling by the death of their child. He retreats into online gambling, she into grief support chat rooms because her husband won’t talk to her. When their identities are stolen, and bank accounts drained, they hire Mike (Frank Grillo) – father of one of the two bullies – find out who did it, in part because the police can do nothing without concrete proof, and in part because Derek wants vengeance.

The belabored point of the movie is evident from its title – that the interview, a tool that is said to help people connect with others, really isolates us more. We don’t talk to the people around us, and instead go online to seek other likeminded people – or to find companionship or sex. This is an easy point to make, but not an invalid one. I just wish Disconnect wasn’t so preachy about it.

The only story that comes close to working is the cyber bulling one. What happens in it is all too common an occurrence to our society, and I appreciated the way it handled one of the bullies – they don’t make him into a monster, but a kid who acts without thinking, and then regrets what he did. We all know that people will do things online that they would never do in person – the anonymity of the internet makes that far too easy. Still, this segment gets lost in too many scenes of Jason Bateman looking forlornly at the screen, as each new revelation underlines the fact he didn’t know his son. Bateman seems to be follow the Robin Williams rule that states when a comedic actor does a serious role, he needs to grow a beard. Unfortunately, that’s about all he does.

The other two plot lines strain credibility from the outset. No one involved with the journalist/cybersex story seems to have any idea how either of those things actually work. The complexity of one of the bullies is entirely absent from the portrayal of Kyle’s pimp – who is greasy and disgusting from the outset. That anyone would be as naïve as every character in this part of the movie just doesn’t ring true. The final segment never really gels – partly because Alexander Skarsgaard isn’t given much to do but stare blankly and Patton isn’t given much to do but look concerned – but mainly because little thought seemed to go into this part to begin with.

Disconnect is what happens when filmmakers think they are making something important – and rush into it, without ever really thinking through the film. Yes, you could make a good movie about the evils of the internet. But Disconnect is not that movie.

Movie Review: In the Fog

In the Fog
Directed by: Sergei Loznitsa.
Written by: Sergei Loznitsa based on the novel by Vasili Bykov.
Starring: Vladimir Svirskiy (Sushenya), Vladislav Abashin (Burov), Sergei Kolesov (Voitik), Nikita Peremotovs (Grisha), Yuliya Peresild (Anelya), Kirill Petrov (Koroban), Dmitrijs Kolosovs (Mishuk), Stepans Bogdanovs (Topchievsky), Dmitry Bykovskiy (Yaroshevich), Vlad Ivanov (Grossmeier), Igor Khripunov (Mirokha), Nadezhda Markina (Burov's mother).

In the Fog is a long, slow, extremely morose movie that takes place in Belarus during the Nazi occupation in WWII. It looks at three Belarusians, each of whom is presented with impossible moral dilemmas in which there is no right or wrong answer. By the time we get to the downbeat ending, you’ll probably agree that the decision the lead character makes at the end – as the fog rolls in, is the only logical thing to do.

The film opens with two partisan soldiers – Burov (Vladislav Abashin) and Voitik (Sergei Kolesov) arriving at the home of Sushenya (Vladimir Svierskiy). They are there to kill him, because they assume that Sushenya is a traitor – four men were arrested, three were hanged, and the fourth, Sushenya, was let go freely. That is all the evidence the partisans need to convict and execute him. After a long talk in Sushenya’s house, the pair take him out deep into the woods, and force him to dig his own grave. Right as Burov is about to put a bullet in Sushenya’s head, the Nazis arrive and shoot Burov, leaving him severely wounded. Instead of running off to freedom, Sushenya instead picks up Burov and tries to carry him to safety. Voitik, who has largely been silent, begrudgingly goes along with him – after all, he doesn’t want to carry Burov himself, and what else is he supposed to do.

The film is built on flashbacks – we see what the three men did that led to their execution (it isn’t really motivated by patriotism, but the desire to get rid of their boss), and what Sushenya did not do with them – and how it was they allowed him to walk free. The film also shows what led both Burov and Voitik to join the partisans, and what led them to Sushenya’s house that day – making it inarguable that of the three of them, the traitor Sushenya, is the only one who hasn’t really done anything wrong. He’s almost a Christ-like figure – dying for everyone else’s sins.

The film was written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa, based on the novel by Vasili Bykov. Loznitsa’s last film, My Joy, was highly praised (and remains unseen by me) for its innovative style and story structure. There is nothing that you would call overly innovative in this film however – it is a classically structured movie, the visual style favoring long, slow tracking shots as the men walk through the forest, and long stationary shots as the rest.

The movie, to put it mildly, is deliberately paced. There are long stretches with little, if any, dialogue and when the characters do speak, they’re in no real hurry to say anything. The dialogue is mostly perfunctory and not very enlightening or interesting. Given these limitations, the performances are about as good as can be expected. I have a feeling that the novel may have gotten over much of the slow, heavy, non-dialogue scenes by replacing them with an inner monologue – but nothing of the sort exists in the movie itself, where we simply sit back and watch these people confront their inevitability of their doom.

The movie is interesting in the why it presents both the Belarusian characters and the Nazis. We expect the Nazis to be evil – and indeed they are, in particularly the one played by Vlad Ivanov, the Romanian actor used often in roles of vile people – like in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or Police, Adjective. What he does in the movie is cruel – but then, he’s a Nazi, what else did you expect. But if anything, Loznitsa is harder on the Belarusians themselves – for turning on each other so easily and treating death so callously. It’s my understanding people in Russia thought that My Joy was overly hard on the Russian people – something In the Fog will likely be accused of as well.

I liked part of In the Fog – it is an interesting, well made and for the most part well acted film. But god is it a slow film – a morose slog where you starting preying about an hour into the movie for the characters to just die already and put them out of their misery. It isn’t a bad film by any means – but I sure wouldn’t want to have to sit through it a second time.

Movie Review: Evocateaur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie

Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie
Directed by: Seth Kramer & Daniel A. Miller & Jeremy Newberger.

Does anyone really remember Morton Downey Jr.? I admit that before this movie, I hadn’t heard of the man. I was a little young to remember his short lived talk show – that debuted in 1987 as a local show, went National in 1988, and was cancelled in 1989. In two years, Morton Downey Jr. went from being someone most had never heard of to national celebrity to pretty much a nobody again. Yet when you watch the movie – which uses generous clips from the show itself – you see how influential Morton Downey Jr. really was on our current culture – in mostly negative ways. You can see the influences of everyone from trash talks shows Jerry Springer, to Conservative pundits like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, to the cast of Jersey Shore reflected in the show, the host and the audience.

The easiest way to describe Morton Downey Jr. as host of his talk show would be to say he’s seems like a man who watched Peter Finch in Network, and decided that he too could do that. He is angry pretty much the entire time he’s onscreen – always with a cigarette in his hand, screaming at his guests – and encouraging the audience – affectionately referred to as “The Beast” – to do the same. He spoke for “the common man” sick of politicians in Washington screwing everything up. He was an unabashed Conservative, and the audience tuned in every night to hear him yell at his guests – bleeding heart liberals. This probably describes why his show didn’t last very long – if you knew going on the show meant being screamed at by the host, and the audience, why the hell would you agree to be on it? He got a lot of mileage out of the Tawana Brawley case – that of a 15 year old African American girl who accused 6 white men – including police officers and an attorney – of raping her, then leaving her in a trash bag, with racial slurs written all over her. The case, eventually, proved to be false – with Brawley making the whole thing up – but Downey delighted in doing show after show on the case while it was national news – Brawley advocate Al Sharpton was a frequent guest. The show, which was never high minded to begin with, quickly devolved into a sideshow – culminating with Downey taking a page out of Brawley’s book, and faking an attack by skinheads – eventually leading to Downey to return to obscurity, trying, unsuccessfully to restart his career. The movie ends with his battle with lung cancer – which did get him somewhat back into the spotlight, in a far more sympathetic way than before.

The film was directed by Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger – three self-professed fans of the show, who admit that Downey’s angry rants appealed directly to them at the time when the were teenagers. They, along with some other fans as teens, look back on the show mostly with nostalgia for their youth, mixed with a little bit of embarrassment for being so taken with the show at the time. The trio of directors take a fairly standard documentary approach to the film – mixing clips from the show with many talking heads – and a few interesting animated sequences, which takes the logical step of making Downey into a literal cartoon character.

Despite the fact that the trio are fans, they do not turn this into a fawning picture of Downey. Far from it. What the trio eventually conclude about Downey is that he was hungry for fame – by any means necessary. The son of Morton Downey, the famed singer and movie star from the 1930s, Downey grew up privileged, with a demanding father, but powerful friends – he knew the Kennedy quite well growing up. Part of the reason he became such a Conservative seems to be little more than a shot at his father, who was an avowed liberal. The producers of the show, when interviewed, essentially admit that they had to teach Downey all about the issues he was supposedly so outraged about night after night. Downey, it seems, didn’t really care about politics – he cared about fame.

Still, despite all of this, it’s hard not to somewhat feel for Downey in the later part of the film. He was a man haunted by his father, and essentially self-destructs. The fact that the film only has an interview with one of his children – who remembers him mostly with affection, although admitting he wasn’t the best father – or any of his ex-wives probably means the people who knew Downey best still have issues with him. That said, this is still a fascinating movie about a short lived TV show, with a blowhard host, who is at least partly responsible for the state of television culture over two decades later.

My Answer to the Latest Criticwire Survey Question: Cell Phone Use in the Theater

Using the already infamous incident at TIFF this year, where film blogger Alex Billington called 911 due to someone using his cellphone at a Press & Industry Screening this year, the latest Criticwire survey question asks what to do about cellphone usage at the movie.

 

Like many people, I can become annoyed when someone whips out their cellphone in a movie, and starts texting, tweeting, e-mailling or whatever else they want to do. And like most people, I think what Billington did was idiotic - the police have more important things to do than to feal with some moron using a cellphone in a movie, and an equally big moron bugging them about a guy with a cellphone in a movie.

 

What is odd is that you would think the Press and Industry screenings would be filled with people who care about the movies - they are, afterall, there working, and the public screenings at the Festival would be filled with cell phone usage. As someone who saw 17 movies at TIFF last week, I only saw one lite up cellphone screen during the movie the whole festival - and that was for all of about 2 seconds. If you are stupid enough to use a cellphone in a public screening at TIFF, you get shouted at pretty quickly from all angles.

 

But in general, is there anything that can be done about cell phone usage during a movie? The answer, sadly, is probably not. There are too many people who for whatever reason feel the need to be "connected" at all times, and for them not looking at their cell phone for 2 hours is unthinkable. They feel they are more important than everyone else, and as such, don't care if they hurt the experience of those around them, as long as they get what they want.

 

But I also have to say this - I have had very few problems with people on cellphones in movies in the past couple of years - in my experience, it's not quite the epidemic some make it out to be. Now perhaps this is because I go to the movies in Canada, and we are obviously much more polite and considerate than Americans (not likely). Or it could be that since my daughter was born two years ago, I mainly have to go the movies solo - without my wife. I'm not embarassed to go to the movies alone - after all, I'm there to see a movie, not have a conversation - but I do go during off peak hours -either the first matinee on Saturday or Sunday, or else a late show on Sunday, Monday or Wednesday (I skip cheap Tuesdays if I can help it). I also sit near the front of the theater - meaning fewer people are in front of me, so if someone checks their phone behind me, I don't see it. Most of the time, when I do see someone check their phone - it's for a few brief seconds (perhaps the check the time) and that's it.

 

I don't doubt though that going to more crowded times results in more cell phone usage - I just don't know what can be done about it. Sure, it would be nice if every theater was like the Alamo Drafthouse, and threw people out on their ass if they use a phone. But that's not going to happen. Puting in cell phone jammers won't work either - apparently, it is illegal, plus parents need to be able to be contacted in case of emergency (me and my wife have a rule - if it's an emergency, she calls twice in a row, so my phone, which is on vibrate, goes off twice in quick succession, and I can leave the theater to call her).

 

Basically, I think this is a futile fight against people being rude. You're not going to win. So avoid Friday and Saturday nights, when the theater will be packed with people. The fewer people in a theater, the better chance there is that one of them isn't an asshole.

Movie Review: Insidious: Chapter 2

Insidious: Chapter 2
Directed by: James Wan.
Written by: Leigh Whannell & James Wan.
Starring: Patrick Wilson (Josh Lambert), Rose Byrne (Renai Lambert), Ty Simpkins (Dalton Lambert), Lin Shaye (Elise Rainier), Barbara Hershey (Lorraine Lambert), Steve Coulter (Carl), Leigh Whannell (Specs), Angus Sampson (Tucker), Andrew Astor (Foster Lambert), Hank Harris (Young Carl), Jocelin Donahue (Young Lorraine), Lindsay Seim (Young Elise Rainier), Danielle Bisutti (Mother of Parker Crane), Tyler Griffin (Young Parker), Garrett Ryan (Young Josh), Tom Fitzpatrick (Bride in Black / Old Parker), Michael Beach (Detective Sendal).

Perhaps the biggest problem with Insidious: Chapter 2 is heightened expectations. When the original film came out in 2010, I went in not expecting much. James Wan was the director of the first (and best) of the Saw series, the horrible Dead Silence, and the underrated revenge film Death Sentence – but nothing I had seen made me believe he had a truly great horror movie in him. But Insidious was just about as good as mainstream American horror films get – it was well made, built on tension, not gore, had relatable characters and was genuinely scary. Than just two months ago, Wan outdid himself with the surprise summer hit The Conjuring – a film that wanted to be a more realistic horror film – and succeeded. Like many films, it owes a large debt to The Exorcist, and well it didn’t break new ground like that 1973 classic, it is about as good as the films The Exorcist has inspired can possibly be. Coming off of back to back genuinely frightening, well-made horror movie then, Wan faced something with Insidious: Chapter 2 he didn’t before – people actually expecting a horror movie to be good.

To be fair, Insidious: Chapter 2 is in no way a bad way film. Yes, it repeats the first film a little too much – as is to be expected in an sequel – and it is at times a little too clever for its own sake – trying to explain some of what happened in the original film with the events in this film. Horror movies require full immersion by the audience for them to work – which is why, I like to see them with as few people in the theater as possible (an errant cell phone, some whispers, etc. that normally you brush off quickly can spoil the whole atmosphere of even the best horror movies). By trying to be a little too clever – and adding in a few moments of bizarre comic relief that border on slapstick – Wan takes you out of Insidious: Chapter 2 a little too often for it to as sustained an exercise in horror filmmaking as his last two films.

Still though, you have to give Wan credit. He may not exactly come up with new ways to scare the audience – his horror movie style is still more rooted in classical tropes (which meant the torture porn he was saddled with for years after Saw was always unwarranted), but he does find ways to subtly shift those classic tropes. He never quite gives us precisely what we are expecting from him, and finds ways to make his films not just scary, but genuinely unsettling. These aren’t horror movie you see once are momentarily scared by while watching and then forget about them. These are the horror movies you find yourself thinking about in the dead of night when you hear a strange noise.

I don’t want to say much about the plot of Insidious: Chapter 2 for a few reasons – the first being, as with any scary movie, surprise is a necessary element for them to work. And the second is that the secrets of Insidious: Chapter are all fairly obvious – if you don’t figure most of them out well before the movie makes its series of big reveals, than I doubt you’ve seen too many horror movies before. I will say that for the most part, the performances are a step above most horror movies – especially by the veterans – Barbara Hershey, given much more to do this time out, Lin Shaye as the medium who isn’t as creepy as she appears, and Steve Coulter, as a newcomer to the series. Poor Patrick Wilson is stuck with a nearly impossible role, and Rose Bryne, while appropriately terrified at the right moments, is more shunted off to the background that I expected.

Does Insidious: Chapter 2 work? Kind of. There are some wonderful horror movie set pieces in the film (never have dice seemed scarier), but it doesn’t have the same kind of propulsive terror that either the original Insidious or The Conjuring had. The result is a movie that is less than the sum of its parts. Wan, however, is still one of the American horror movies directors to watch – perhaps the only one working in truly mainstream horror (others, like Rob Zombie or Ti West, are doing smaller films). It’s almost too bad Wan is directing the next Fast & Furious movie – partly because Justin Lin has done a very good job of elevating those movies in the last few installments, but also because I want to see Wan continue to hone his horror movie chops. Insidious: Chapter 2 may not be the triumph that Insidious or The Conjuring were – but it’s made by a very talented director.

Movie Review: We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
Directed by: Alex Gibney.

If you’ve followed the strange, ever twisting story of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, you probably aren’t going to learn all that much new information in Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. But Gibney – who is seemingly able to churn out a new documentary about once every six months, with a surprisingly high level of consistency, has a skill at bringing everything together in one, neat little two hour and ten minute package. Here is the kind of documentary about a controversial subject that I like – it will (and has) angered Assange’s many, many passionate supporters, and will likely anger his many, many passionate detractors as well. Which is a complicated way of saying that Gibney probably gets most of it right. Things are never as simple as the people on either extreme would like us to think they are.

Perhaps the saddest thing about WikiLeaks is the fact that on some level, we need an organization like this. When the U.S. Military gunned down reporters from Reuters – bizarrely claiming their cameras looked like guns, and then killed a father in a van who was simply taking his kids to school, there was little outrage – it was a minor story, dismissed by the Obama White House as an unfortunate accident, and quickly forgotten. That is until Assange got his hands on the videotape from the helicopter that showed what happened. Apparently those in the military like to trade these “kill tapes” amongst themselves – and eventually they found their way into Assange’s hands, who put them on his website in all their gruesome horror (including some sickening jokes being told “I just ran over a guy” one soldier says while practically chuckling.) Later, when all the PFC Bradley Manning leaked those hundreds of thousands of documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he didn’t go to a major news outlet – he went to Assange. And although the New York Times and The Guardian partnered with Assange to publish the most scandalous of the documents, they quickly backed away from him once they were through. Assange is useful for the mainstream media to do their dirty work, but they really don’t want anything to do with him.

Which on some level is understandable. After all, as the movie makes clear, Assange didn’t care if publishing all those documents got some people killed. One reporter at The Guardian recounts the time when Assange told him that “If an Afghan civilian co-operated with U.S. forces, they deserve to die”. Assange simply doesn’t care what consequences these leaks may have – he’s an idealist who believes that no information should be secret. That is, of course, until the information is about him.

The first half of the movie is better than the second half – as it documents Assange’s rise from obscure, genius hacker and his merry men of likeminded geniuses, to one of the most famous men in the world due to the leaks. This part is complex, because on one level you have to admire Assange for sticking to his ideals, and on the other, you can dislike the means in which he goes about things – and the ego maniac you can tell is forming. The second half of the movie isn’t quite as good – as it documents Assange’s fall – where he goes from genius idealist, into paranoid fanatic.

Did the U.S. government set up Assange with the two rape charges in Sweden, like Assange, and many of his supporters claim? Not likely. As the documentary points out (actually, a news clip from Assange’s own lawyer), it would be far easier for America to get Assange from the Brits than from the Swedes, so if they were going to cook up charges against him, it makes no sense to do it in Sweden (and, of course, there is the fact that the U.S. has no charges pending against him). But the two rape charges – which are still outstanding – is really what hastens Assange’s – and by extension WikiLeaks – fall. Assange grew increasingly paranoid, starting asking WikiLeaks employees to sign the type of non-disclosure agreements their sources often had to ignore to give them their stories. And then, last year, instead of going to Sweden to face the charges – which may or may not be trumped up depending on who you talk to (and Gibney talks to many people, including one of Assange’s accusers, who has had to face bizarre, misogynistic attacks by his supporters), he took refuge in the Ecuador Embassy in Britain – a nation he calls “principled”, but has a history of jailing reporters.

The hole in We Steal Secrets is the fact that Gibney couldn’t get an interview with Assange himself – claiming, in the documentary that he met with him several times to work out an agreement for an interview, but finally couldn’t work out anything when Assange insisted on $1 million to appear in the film (Assange denies this, saying he never intended to take part). But this isn’t as big a hole as you may think considering that Gibney has interviews with many, many others involved in the story – and access to the many, many interviews Assange gave to practically everyone else on the planet other than Gibney.

The other fascinating story thread, that Gibney weaves into the Assange’s narrative, is that of Manning – the whistleblower who gave Assange all those documents. He may never would have been caught if he hadn’t have been stupid if he hadn’t confided in the wrong person on the internet – a former hacker, who eventually turned Manning in. The portrait of Manning is far more sympathetic than the one of Assange – a lonely, sexually confused kid, who somehow had access to all these documents, and decided the world needed to see them. He took a moral stand – and has now been horribly mistreated in jail (but don’t worry, people have assured Obama he’s being treated fairly), where he’ll probably spend the rest of his life. Surprisingly, there are some former government officials who argue that there are too many secrets as well. Manning knew the potential consequences of his actions, and took the risk anyway, for something he believed in. I can feel sympathy for that. I don’t feel much sympathy for Assange though. Whatever situation he’s in, he got himself there – and now, he’s trying to avoid facing the consequences.

Movie Review: Wish You Were Here

Wish You Were Here
Directed by:  Kieran Darcy-Smith.
Written by: Kieran Darcy-Smith & Felicity Price.
Starring: Felicity Price (Alice Flannery), Joel Edgerton (Dave Flannery), Teresa Palmer (Steph McKinney), Antony Starr (Jeremy King), Nicholas Cassim (Jon Canane), Otto Page (Max Flannery), Isabelle Austin-Boyd (Holly Flannery), Tina Bursill (Margie McKinney), Wayne Blair (Willis), Valerie Bader (Helen King), Pip Miller (Jim King).

Kieran Darcy-Smith is part of a group of Australian filmmakers who all work on each other films. The best known film by these filmmakers is David Michod’s excellent Animal Kingdom – a gritty crime thriller that made my top 10 list a few years back, and got Jacki Weaver a richly deserved Oscar nomination for her performance as the mother from hell. Another excellent little noir called The Square (2008) was also made by this group – directed by Nash Edgerton, and written by his brother Joel. Darcy-Smith had acting roles in both of those films – and for his debut feature, he cast Joel (again), alongside Darcy-Smith’s wife Felicity Price (who is also wrote the screenplay with) and Teresa Palmer – who starred in a short film for Nash Edgerton – who also worked as a stunt coordinator on the film (which he does mostly for big Hollywood movies – like the upcoming Wolverine movie). This incestuous group of Aussies have made some wonderful films – not just the features, but the shorts that are nasty, violent and funny at the same time. While Wish You Were Here does not reach the level of The Square or Animal Kingdom, it is a promising debut film from Darcy-Smith.

The film opens in Cambodia, where two couples have gone on holiday. Alice and Dave (Price and Edgerton) are married, with two kids and a third on the way, who are talked into going by her younger sister Steph (Palmer) with her new boyfriend Jeremy (Anthony Starr) – who needs to go there on business, although that business may not be on the up and up. The movie then flashes forward back to Australia – Alice and Dave have come home, but Steph has stayed behind because Jeremy is missing. Steph will soon return as well bringing with her revelations – not about Jeremy – that Dave wishes she didn’t. These, couple with the investigation into what happened to Jeremy, throws everyone into chaos.

In a way, Wish You Were Here is similar to an Eli Roth movie – except done more realistically with less grotesque violence and exploitation. Roth’s films – from the two Hostel films and his latest Aftershock (which he co-wrote and stars in) – are all about ugly Americans, going to a poor country, acting like idiots, and being punished for it. That describes Wish You Were Here pretty well, even if this time they are Aussies and not Americans behaving badly. Still though, these are well off people from the first world, going to a third world country and exploiting them – only to eventually come face to face with the reality of that place. Unlike Roth, Darcy-Smith takes the concept seriously though – and as a result, has made a much better film.

The star of the film is clearly Price, who along with her husband, wrote herself a great role. At the beginning of the movie, she looks to have it all – she’s very happy in her suburban life with her seemingly perfect husband and great kids. And she is the one who takes everything that happens the hardest – she feels betrayed by her husband and her sister, and throws herself into trying to help find Jeremy – if only because she doesn’t know what else to do. Edgerton is good in a tricky role – it requires him to convey a lot, without doing very much as he is often still, often moping, and always clearly hiding something. It’s another strong performance by an actor whose resume is filling them (The Great Gatsby aside). And Palmer, who was good with an American accent in Warm Bodies earlier this year, strikes the right notes as the perpetually whiny, selfish Steph – who cannot understand why no one sees her as the victim she so clearly sees herself as.

The film’s structure, of flashing back and forth between the past in Cambodia, and present is Australia, gets a little annoying at times – it’s clear that Darcy-Smith and Price have structured it this way to preserve the mysteries of the movie, which turn out to be rather bland and predictable when they are finally revealed. The film is just a touch too clever for its own good – disguising things we have guessed. I did admire how the movie didn’t try to make any of its characters sympathetic though – none of the characters are really bad, but none are all that good either – not even Alice, who selfishly sulks to the detriment of those around (and inside) her.

Wish You Were Here never reaches the heights of Animal Kingdom or The Square – two films which it will inevitably be compared to. Both of those films were smarter and more intense, and featured even better acting than is on display here – even if acting is this film’s strong suit. Still, I want to see what Darcy-Smith comes up with next. This is a promising debut film.