Rating: D+
Dir: Al Carretta
Star: Lesley Hayes, Tom Patient, Hattie Kemish, Eleanor Pead
I was drawn to this by the two, diametrically opposed reviews on the IMDb. One, rated 2/10: “Please watch this POS movie if you enjoy so bad it’s good fare like The Room… Characters have lines that no human would ever utter.” The other, rated 9/10: “Lead female Shelby holds an owl for the duration of the film. If you can’t make the connection as to why, you won’t understand… Drenched in irony, the satirical, self-referencing nature of the film will bypass you if you don’t accept that everything on screen is a deliberate mocking of the production process, acting and us, the audience.” How could a film possibly provoke such diverse reactions? Well, having now seen it…
My reaction probably leans more toward the former, because it certainly is painfully pretentious – to be fair, I suspect deliberately so. It takes place during the COVID lockdown, and a focus group of actors is hired, and brought to a theatre, supposedly to provide insight into the arts industry’s response to the pandemic. The main one is Melody (Hayes), a non-actress, only attending as a replacement for her flatmate, Maddie (Kemish), who has a Zoom audition she can’t skip. Running the event is Ben (Patient), a director startlingly full of his own importance to Zeppelin-like levels, and is as interested in casting for his own film, The Mist, as the official purpose of the workshop.
I recommend avoiding any online synopsis, because it’s a huge spoiler, although it was so unrelated to the first hour, I had written it off as some kind of clerical error. It does finally come to pass, and is a decent upending of what has gone before, certainly. Unfortunately, what has gone before is largely a slog to get through, being both extremely chatty and at a distance of six or more feet, painfully COVID-y. Ben in particular loves the sound of his own voice, and it’s not an affection I share. Melody is more sympathetic, though Hayes’ performance is rather obviously an actress pretending to be a non-actress, and the rest of the cast are not more than theatrical stereotypes. The title, a line from The Tempest, sums up the generally incestuous approach.
On the other hand, Carretta is a veritable one-man studio, having made 24 features for a total cost significantly below £100,000, which deserves respect. Most of them appear to be on Tubi. But I can’t say there was much here to lure me in to further sampling of his work. It feels little more than a time capsule, given how COVID is now a largely forgotten footnote in recent history, and is the kind of self-absorbed and navel-gazing work which would perhaps be better off performed in a theatre above a pub somewhere. The twist only nudges the needle fractionally toward the positive, coming as both too little, and very much too late.
And I still don’t know the significance of the owl.