Happy Now

After Sara Sugarman and Darren Ripley you might have thought that SGRIN and The Welsh Arts Council would have had enough of camp, self effacing comedians - but no, despite its chocolate box wrapping, Phillipa Cousins debut effort fails to raise many laughs and succeeds in compounding negative welsh stereotypes. I suppose the success of Kevin Allen's cult hit Twin Town started this movement but I wish it would end, quickly.

On a more positive note, there are many promising elements in Happy Now. The locations have been well chosen and atmospherically photographed in cinemascope by Richard Greatrex. The sound design and music are also noticeably good.

In fact the production values as a whole make Happy Now feel like Hollywood. The strongest scenes include the cult sacrifice of a cat and the engagement of a local black magician to 'disappear' the films young protagonist . If only Happy Now had dropped its knowing self parody and tackled more seriously the darker ingredients of its story it might well have achieved its ambition be 'a Welsh Twin Peaks'.

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.

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'.

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.

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!