Happy Now

Jennifer is a young girl who wins the beauty contest in her local town. That night she runs out of petrol and a kindly tramp goes to get help. While away two young men start bothering Jen and kill her by accident. They take the body and frame the tramp - who gets life. 14 years later Nicky is brought to the village by her mother and startles the locals by being the spitting image of Nicky (despite being born the year after her death).

I watched this as I always believe in giving a chance to British films - no matter how poorly they were delivered or received. I didn't know much about the film and came to it with no real expectations or preconceptions. The plot seems to be want to be a quirky paranormal mystery of sorts but it is only slightly successful. As a mystery it really needed to have more emotion to it; threads that had potential were poorly dealt with; although the film does quite well towards the end generally it isn't really good enough to hold it all together.

The lack of character is another big fault - the film tries too hard to have side characters who are quirky and weird, and neglects to give the main characters the reality and emotional buy-in that I needed to be able to care. It has been said before, but it does seem to be trying to turn the village into a sort of Welsh Twin Peaks. Even the thread that would have been easiest to draw human drama out of (Tin Man's freedom) is not done very well and the pain it causes is only hinted at. The cast are sort of left drifting without the scripted characters to work with. Rossum is very cute but doesn't seem to know what to do with herself. Considine hams up to no great effect even if Coyle shows a good range. Pugh and Puri are both good actors and their meetings should have been much better, as it is neither is that well served.

Overall this is worth watching but really it doesn't work well enough to justify seeing again. At it's core is an interesting story but one that it fails to do anything interesting with. It constantly suggests more interesting threads that it doesn't follow and comes off as self-consciously quirky and dark - to the detriment of the characters, story and film as a whole.

An excellent, off-the-wall, Twin Peaks meets Fargo-esque black comedy thriller. Strong performances by all of this ensemble cast, mixing new and established talent, make this a riveting viewing. Dark, well-observed, comedy-of-errors humour. Beautiful locations, well shot. Excellent score complements the camerawork. I'm sure we'll be hearing more from this talented first time features director.

My friends and I laughed from start to finish with this superb, witty black comedy - the many original characters were well played, yes there were a couple of holes in the plot (how do you escape from the boot of a centrally locked car?) but, hey, I went to be entertained and I was.

We saw this at the Welsh Film Festival - why on earth has it not yet been distributed? We want to see it again to remind ourselves of all those great one-liners.

This movie unjustly suffers mostly from clichés heaped upon it.

It's a Welsh Twin Peaks parody, they say. Too Welsh to be funny - not enough Twin Peaks to work in the end.

In short: This movie is a victim of false expectations.

Yes, there are certain similarities if one spends the whole time comparing, but that does this movie great injustice. The few 'blatant' takes on Welsh culture clichés take NOTHING away from its positive charme - except for nit-picking Welsh viewers, perhaps. To 'foreign' viewers it's a convincing fresco of provincial life, as well as a Chabrol movie seems to non-French viewers. The Twin Peaks connection exists only on a formalistic plane.

Call me stupid, but I feel that this has a far more honest and less pretentious appeal than said cult hyper-soap. Give it a chance. It's more than the sum of your pre-conceptions.

* Schogger13

Writer Belinda Bauer and director Philippa Cousins have turned out a stylish looking Welsh movie that doesn't know if it wants to be a sick black comedy or a semi-serious psycho based murder drama. It clearly wants to be an Alfred Hitchcock copycat film that's too obvious for any success in either genre.

Those with a yen for bizarre and nasty characters or gross situations will find this somehow agreeable but it flounders in typical, modern BFI style and ends up sinking itself in tastelessness.

Best attributes come via the good looking cinematography by Welsh born Richard Greatrex and an OK cast. Otherwise it's another cold and soulless modern wannabe failed 'classic'.