By David Dent
After the mixed reviews of Richard Williams’s 2023 suicide pact drama White Blood, the Australian director returns with that most divisive of vehicles, the POV feature; not ‘found footage’ but a whole movie filmed from the perspective of the lead character.
The POV subject in this case is Sean (Rijen Laine) who, when we first meet him – ok we never actually meet him but you know what I mean – is recovering from some kind of fainting spell while out in the woods. With him are his trainee nurse fiancée Grace (Ana Thu Nguyen), annoying friend Eric (Charles Cottier) and Eric’s med student girlfriend Kate (Alea O’Shea). The reason for the camping trip, in part, is for Sean to track down his missing geneticist father Paul (Stephen Phillips) but also to drink and have a lot of sex with Kate. Practical Grace, who one assumes is saving herself for marriage, disapproves of all this; she is a fixer by profession and inclination, unafraid to face challenges and obstacles. And as the movie progresses, this will be useful.
For Sean is a chap with stuff going on. Still recovering from the death of his younger sister Lily (Mischa Heywood), he’s prone to blackouts and vivid dreams in which he sees sis in various dead and deformed states. It becomes more and more difficult for Sean – and therefore the audience – to work out what’s real and what’s nightmare in his visual world. Eric’s offer of weapons grade shrooms, ostensibly to try and lift his friend’s demeanour, only makes things worse. But the discovery of an isolated cabin, potentially the location of Sean’s father’s experiments, is the cue for some serious next level WTFery.
William’s film is ambitious – not just because of the POV aspect but also the small cast (for the most part it’s a three hander) – and increasingly abstract. It’s a movie to experience rather than understand, although its themes of cloning and illicit experimentation have been done many times, but some of the photographic effects are genuinely trippy, there’s some surprising gore and a couple of jump scares I didn’t see coming.
Bloody Flicks 