Rating: C-
Dir: Tammi Sutton
Star: Keeley Hazell, Craig Rees, Barbara Nedeljakova, Phil Bloomberg
Or, if you prefer, Moping Vol. 1. Because that’s what it kinda feels like. There’s a largely unnecessary prologue in which the young Catherine, finds a spooky doll, and is involved in the death of her annoying brother. I only mention it, because Lynn Lowry shows up as Catherine’s grandmother, sets the acting bar at a level nobody else is able to reach, and then exits the film. We then fast-forward decades, to the adult Catherine (Hazell), who has just lost her daughter Lilly in mysterious circumstances that she just won’t talk about. The incident has driven a wedge between her and husband Harvey (Rees), which pharmaceuticals cannot bridge. Time for a trip to the country then. Surely that’ll cure Catherine.
Spoiler: it does, in fact, not cure her. Catherine spends her days wandering about the corridors of the house, looking mournful, enduring nightmares and other strange experiences. By which I mean she tells Harvey she “fell asleep in the bath.” Which is odd, because when he finds her (top), she is wearing a dressing gown, and outside the bath, which is completely empty. Harvey does not challenge her on this. But then, Harvey’s attitude to the loss of the child apparently should be summed up as, “Well, we can always have another one.” World’s Worst Therapist, Dr. Chandler, isn’t much help. I know! Let’s bring down friends Sasha (Nedeljakova) and Phil (Bloomberg), so they can announce their impending offspring. Surely that’ll cure Catherine.
Spoiler – and stop me if you’ve heard this before: it does, in fact, not cure her. Sasha barely escapes being broiled alive in the sauna, and then… Well, there’s an ending here, which is definitely one of the endings I have seen this week. I’ll say no more there. I was originally going to pour scorn on Hazell, a former page 3 girl, about committing the faux pas of neither being good at acting, nor getting her baps out [therefore, contrary to the title of Hazell’s memoir, Everyone’s Seen My Tits, I still have not]. However, it actually felt like the quality of her performance improved over the course of the film. By the time she is interacting with the ghost of Lilly, it’s fine.
However, this does nothing to address the poor pacing which is at the crux of the film’s problems. After the opening red herring of a prologue, the film simply enters a holding pattern where nothing much is going on. We establish adult Catherine has lost a child and is sad about it. Then, that Catherine is sad about losing a child. A child has been lost, and sadness? Catherine has it. You get the idea. There is also music and sound which is guilty of simply trying too hard. For example, the perfectly modern gate, which screeches open with a sound more appropriate to a dungeon door in Castle Frankenstein. If only Sutton had put as much effort into her script.