Review by Doug Cooper
Stars Ed Gaughan, Andrew Buckley, Jason Isaacs,
Tuppence Middleton, Josef Whitfield, Paul Dallison,
Will Adamsdale, Paprika Steen
Written by Nick Whitfield
Certification UK 15
Runtime 96 minutes
Directed by Nick Whitfield
This movie won the Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature Film at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival. I guess there wasn't much competition. While there's a glimmer of quality it requires great patience to find it.
Ed Gaughan and Andrew Buckley play Davis and Bennett, inept paranormal investigators who clean out people's homes of skeletons. They hibernate in individuals' dreams unearthing their deep secrets. Gaughan is the humourless salesman who never deviates from the rules, a bad cop to Buckley's good cop, he being the more caring and conscientious one. They're not particularly efficient in their endeavours however and are tracked down by their paranoid boss, The Colonel (Isaacs), who gives them a chance to absolve themselves.
They must find the missing husband of unfortunate middle aged Jane (Steen), whose husband went missing eight years ago. Complications ensue when Davis disappears into his own dream as a young boy, and comes out the other side speaking Bulgarian. His dreams are also invaded by Jane's daughter Rebecca (Middleton), a pretty girl with a sixth sense talent for paranormal intrigue.
For the first hour this is a limp and dreary exercise that never takes flight. The two leads are an unfunny duo and one is never charmed by their antics. It's too slackly paced to engage and is very boring but it does improve in the last half hour. Dramatic momentum finally kicks in and the juxtaposition between reality and the dream world acquires a quiet emotional resonance. This low budget presentation finally gains confidence but its too little too late. It's oddly touching come the finish though and with a nice pay-off, but it needs far more energy, gusto and bite to get there.