Here's a film with great ingredients: unfortunately all of them from different genres and mixed together as if at random.
Essentially a detective story, in which a young woman, returning to her hometown, remembers witnessing a crime when still a child, it quickly takes a series of inexplicable turns until it loses direction and energy and ends as a mess with a truly awful gimmick final scene.
Central to the film's many problems are the inept direction which often entirely fails to explain how the plot gets from A to B, preferring instead to chain-link the dead-ends and anomalies by drawing attention to the psychological and mental problems of its unreliable main character. She's off her head, the movie seems to say, so the details don't matter.
Well, sorry, but they do, or at least they should.
For a movie with a genuinely intriguing and promising first half, it's hard to believe how utterly it has fallen apart by about ten minutes into part two, and, sadly, harder still to care. There's an interesting indie movie here about pressure to conform and perform, about the spiral of mental ill-health and the substitute narratives we weave when the world disappoints us, or we disappoint it. But this is not that movie. Far from it.
There's a cameo by David Cronenberg, some truly great locations, mostly decent acting (and some very hammy acting by the duo playing 90's magicians The Magnificent Moulins), but, unfortunately, a script that shouldn't have been given a second read-through let alone a full production.
In here too, as another viewer points out, is a story about child abuse that, in the movie's gimmicky end, may have been another meaningless illusion or confusion. That cop-out in its own makes this very poor offering a bit of an insult.
Do yourself a favour. Go to bed early with a book instead.
