Well, we struck gold with an Aussie production last time, so let’s go for another one. A suicidal teenager (Jordan Dulieu’s Jay) meets terminally-ill 20-something Liz (Freyja Benjamin) and they teach each other about life and love and all that good stuff. Sure, it all sounds a bit sicklit-y, but hey, Babyteeth turned out great, and I seem to be on a good roll for films lately, so maybe this’ll turn out alright.
I don’t even know why I’m even pretending to give this the benefit of the doubt. In the minutes since leaving the cinema, I’ve already taken to calling this Nothing Nowhere Never, because that’s what it made me feel while watching it.
For a start, this film is just so goddamn drab. It’s all washed-out colours and static cinematography, combined with a soundtrack that sounds cobbled together from snippets of royalty-free music circa 2000s YouTube. The camera quality being only slightly above that found in Dhar Mann videos doesn’t help with that.
And speaking of empty platitudes, man, this thing is empty when it comes to actually talking about anything. It tries to make appeals to combating nihilism and mental health struggles, except they’re both presented in the most basic and, even worse, annoying fashions. On the latter point, literally everyone treats the topic of depression and suicidal ideation with such glibness that it’s difficult to latch onto anything in terms of… well, getting past such things. This is made worse by the complete nothing of an ending, which is so open-ended that you can almost see the film spill out of the screen and collect in a beige puddle on the floor.
The story, for what little of one this even possesses, revolves around Jay, Liz, and Jay’s parents (Martin Crewes and Gigi Edgley). This turns out to be a terrible idea because not only are they individually utter engagement vacuums, they’re somehow even worse when brought together. Jay is such a blank slate of a character that it genuinely hurts just to look at him, representing the ‘diagnosis as character’ bullshit that I just hate seeing in movies that discuss such things. I don’t know how much of the blame rests on Nadi Sha and Grant Osborn’s writing or Dulieu’s performance, but it’s clear that neither are doing much to try and salvage the other.
Then there’s Liz, our resident hippy-dippy manic pixie. The film literally opens with her receiving a peyote vision of her own death, and it unfortunately is an accurate lay-up for the copious amounts of tie-die stereotyping surrounding her. It’s a worst of both worlds situation, with her being the unnecessary combination of bad ‘female lead in an American indie flick’ cliches, and counterculture circa the 1960s clichés. On her own, she is consistently irritating, but when put next to Jay, the lack of chemistry between them makes even the smallest amounts of emotional connection they manage to conjure up seem entirely superfluous.
But hey, to give those two crazy kids some credit, at least they feel like they belong in the same movie. The same cannot be said for Crewes and Edgley, who are closer to the supporting cast of Ruben Guthrie than the Love Is Now mushiness of the leads. Edgley as the high-maintenance alcoholic Meredith doesn’t add much, and Crewes as the adulterous snarker David rivals Liz for least likeable presence here. He’s trying so hard to come across as a charming douchebag, but with how many times the film will just fade out his audio while he’s still talking, it seems that the filmmakers have about as high an opinion of what he has to say as I do.
With how badly this film does at trying to drum up any poignancy about trying to find meaning in life and in other people, I get the feeling that I should be a lot more aghast at its failures than I ultimately am. Quite frankly, this is just too bloody boring to get even that much of a reaction out of me. Beyond confusion at how tonally bizarre this film is, all this film did for me is waste about an hour and a half of my time. Kind of wish it did just outright offend me instead of that.
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