madisonmar

After wasting 89 minutes of my life to watch this film, I was haunted by one of the bad songs littered repeatedly in the soundtrack in an attempt to set film's tone. Director Nick Gregory splices & dices 2 terrible songs throughout this film, as if the rights for other music could not be obtained; or perhaps he didn't think his script could stand on its own w/o drowning scenes in music constantly. This was one of many overly stylized gimmicks Gregory uses, including annoying jump cuts within single conversations. He also exploits juxtaposing scenes back and forth, which loses its effect when used too often. He splices sounds effects too, like the sound of a cigarette burning. In one of the back and forth scenes, a conversation with 2 people on a tennis court is shot with the sound of a tennis ball being hit back and forth. The hand-held camera techniques are laughably bad. He attempts to create tension during a stressful phone call by moving the camera erratically around the actor's face, creating headaches. The aforementioned tennis court scene also had the camera whipping back and forth from actor to actor as they spoke... yeah, they're on a tennis court, we get it. These are film techniques I'd expect in a student film. Kudos to all the actors for doing a great job despite the poor taste of the director/script. Low budget films can be great with vision, imagination, and style. Gregory has none of these.