Happy Now

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.

The dark comedy concept of this film was a plus. Some American viewers might find the Welsh/British accent is difficult to understand; however, there are some good one-liners. The movie seemed a bit rushed in places. For example the love story just happened rather suddenly. Most of the casting was good. However,the father's appearance left one wondering how he could have fathered those two girls. The detective (Ioan Gruffudd) was quite able, sensitive, and strong.

The comedy along with the attractive and quirky characters could make this into a cult favorite. It's certainly worth a look.

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.

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.

I also stumbled across this film on BBC2 by accident. Why wasn't it promoted more by the Beeb? Do pull your finger out, BBC!

It's not every night that a really great film comes along and it's also made in Britain too. I decided to watched this film because it was set in Wales and I'm half Welsh myself. All British films really need to be promoted more and given a better slot in the scheduling on terrestrial TV. Not everyone has cable you know!

I really loved the dark humour of this movie. All the acting was superb but I was particularly struck by Paddy Considine. He's certainly someone to watch. A very edgy performance. And he's cute as well!