Sometimes, my habit of keeping track of names attached to movies gets me interested in new releases for all the wrong reasons. Much like with Fatale, The Unholy, and Kidnapped, I gravitated towards this Ireland-set romantic comedy not because of its cast, or its setting, or any of its actual content, but rather because I’m familiar with one of the filmmakers for something… infamous, let’s say. And in the case of Finding You, we have director Brian Baugh, who those with a hate-boner for PureFlix (let’s not be too hypocritical about such things, *ahem*) might remember from I’m Not Ashamed, a religious film about the Columbine school shooting that treated the subject matter with the nuance of a monster truck at a divorce hearing. I won’t say I was expecting more ‘God vs. those darn vidya gammers’, but I won’t say that primed me for good things either.
And in a way, this has a fair bit in common with I’m Not Ashamed, at least in terms of structure. See, that film was mainly focused on one of the victims of the shooting, but it also involved a lot of other shit that didn’t really need to be there (especially with how leaden a hefty amount of the dialogue turned out, in typical PureFlix fashion). Finding You has the same issue. It starts out with violinist Finley (Rose Reid) taking a semester abroad in a small Irish town, but there’s quite a few subplots bordering that one idea.
There’s also the inclusion of young movie star Beckett (Jedidiah Goodacre, easily the most Amish-sounding name I’ve ever encountered in these reviews) filming a movie nearby, the resulting romance, the bed-and-breakfast they both stay at by sheer coincidence (I’ll refrain from using that word again, lest I use it to describe every plot development here), Vanessa Redgrave as a crotchety old woman that everyone in the town hates for… reasons, showbiz drama surrounding Beckett’s public life, an old drunk who plays a mean fiddle, Finley going on a graveyard scavenger hunt using her brother’s drawings, etc.
It’s a two-hour film that certainly feels like it, but oddly enough, that didn’t end up rubbing against my pre-established short attention span for such things. It’s more that the film is packed to the gills, and it feels like a lot of trimming could have been done to make the dramatic moments ring through a bit clearer, but it isn’t actively dull to sit through in the moment. It’s quite cheesy in places, but like the scenes showing the film-within-a-film that Beckett is starring in, quite a bit of that is deliberate (right down to the Asylum-level effects work on the dragons therein). How deliberate, though, is up for debate, given the repeated line of “things aren’t always as they appear”, in a film where the opposite couldn’t possibly be more apt.
But again, I have no real hate for this thing. As much as their chemistry is rocky in a lot of places, I liked the two main leads, the scenes set in the town pub were welcoming as they should be, and for as Macaulay Culkin as Beckett’s professional arrangements are, I kinda dug the comparisons made between small town and Tinsel Town when it comes to rumours and public perception dictating how people are treated. Even with everything that’s happened over the last five years, the degree to which I got into the depiction of Beckett’s behind the scenes drama was rather unexpected. Shame the same can’t be said for the third-act break-up, as this has a particularly egregious example.
It’s a bit of an Irish stew of a film, but credit to the makers for giving a damn about what went into it and how smoothly it goes down. There’s nothing groundbreaking here as far as ‘big fish in a small pond’ storytelling, but for a relatively low-key tourist flick, it’s very pleasant and didn’t drag at any point, even with the overstuffed narrative on display. I wouldn’t say this is worth seeking out, but if it pops up on streaming at some point in the future, it’s a decent serving of scenic comfort food.
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