The Dink (2026) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: A washed-up tennis prodigy turns to pickleball to save his father’s country club and confront his past

One of these days, Apple TV is going to make a great film. Some of its TV output has been superb, but its straight-to-streaming selections have been poor. It has made some good movies, but they’ve generally been films that received cinema releases. I’m not complaining about that: I’ll always support films getting a cinema release. But it does make Apple TV a difficult streaming service for me to justify once the new season of Ted Lasso finishes.

On the plus side, none of them have been particularly awful. They’ve had some that are bland, but nothing as bad as some of Prime’s offerings. It’s into this state of mediocrity that we’re given The Dink. That’s particularly disappointing because Josh Greenbaum has made two films that I have a strong fondness for: Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar and Strays. Based on those two films, he’s the correct choice to direct Spaceballs 2. Based on The Dink, I’m worried.

It reminds me of the worst parts of comedies made by what the media dubbed the “Frat Pack”, and the comedy that surrounded it: Judd Apatow, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Will Ferrell, etc. The sort of films that would find a joke and then run it into the ground. Like they were improvising, but not bothering to edit because they wanted to make sure everybody got their shtick in. It would be improved if it tried to be less of a comedy. If it stopped trying to shoehorn jokes into scenes where they don’t belong. Especially since it derails both the realism and characterisation for the sake of getting another joke in.

The insistence on comedy also comes at the expense of emotion. The film reveals late on that Dustin didn’t break his wrist in a freak accident, but broke it on purpose because he was ashamed of losing in front of his dad. That’s powerful. It should be a turning point in the narrative, something that changes how we see him. At the very least, his dad should find out and realise the trauma he’s inflicted on his son. Nope. It changes nothing. It’s not helped by the way the film treats everyone as comedy characters rather than real people. So you don’t actually give a shit.

There’s some weird narrative logic here. The film starts with Dustin’s dad being annoyed at him for banning people from the club for playing pickleball. But then his dad holds a meeting saying they need to ban pickleball players from the club because he thinks they’re being too demanding with requests like, “Make it so our court isn’t a deathtrap.” If he’s genuinely that annoyed by the pickleball players being there, wouldn’t Dustin banning them be exactly what he wanted?

Not that it’s all negative. The John McEnroe bits are funny, particularly because of how absolutely absurd they are. It’s one of the few running jokes that doesn’t run out of steam. He’s weirdly good at comedy. Less so is Mary Steenburgen, which is strange because she’s usually REALLY good. But for whatever reason, she’s not at her best here. To be honest, it’s difficult for anybody to stand out when the characters aren’t people so much as caricatures. Nobody is given enough depth to really show what they can do. Aaron Chen seems promising, though. I get the feeling he’d make a great best-friend character.

The biggest problem is that The Dink feels like it thinks it’s funnier than it actually is. There are funny ideas here, but they’re buried underneath jokes that don’t land and characters that you don’t buy. There’s a better film hiding underneath all of this. If the father-son relationship had been explored properly, the movie could have been genuinely sweet. Instead, the comedy constantly gets in the way of what could have been a surprisingly effective emotional story.

Josh Greenbaum has already shown that he can make ridiculous comedy work. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is completely bonkers, but it understands exactly how ridiculous it is. Strays is similarly stupid, but there’s a confidence to it. The Dink feels much less controlled. It’s as though everyone involved is trying so hard to make sure we’re having fun that they’ve forgotten to trust the material to actually be funny.

It’s not terrible. There are some laughs, a few good performances buried underneath the caricatures, and John McEnroe is consistently entertaining. But for a comedy with this much talent, The Dink is surprisingly forgettable. Greenbaum has proven he can do much better. Hopefully Spaceballs 2 reminds me of that.

Pressure (2026) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: The massive Allied seaborne invasion of Normandy is completely prepared, but one vital detail remains unconfirmed: the unpredictable British weather

People talk about superhero fatigue. They say audiences are fed up with superhero movies, and that’s why the MCU has gone slightly downhill in the last few years (nothing whatsoever to do with a lack of planning whilst trying to plan out a multi-film saga). I get it. Going to another movie where people in costumes make quips between punching people in the face can make you feel like you’re living in a cinematic Groundhog Day. I have something similar: I’ve seen too many World War 2 movies. If I put together all the films I’ve seen about the war in one continuous playlist, it would probably end up being longer than the war itself. I know there are lots of stories to tell about that war: nationalism, pride, heartbreak, humanity. But those stories could be told against the backdrop of almost any war. Personally, I think part of the reason filmmakers keep returning to World War 2 is that it’s one of the few wars with an unambiguous villain, one that was conveniently distinctive enough to give filmmakers a visual shorthand that audiences instantly recognise.

A big reason I’ve grown tired of World War 2 films is their predictability. It’s hard to find tension when we know what’s going to happen. That hurts films like Pressure, because we already know what happened; it’s like watching a football game where you already know the score. Although I should point out, for a film that relies so heavily on us knowing the significance of D-Day, it doesn’t actually do much to explain what D-Day was in the first place. But back to the point. We know how it ends; D-Day was a success. So either their weather predictions were wrong, and the attack was launched anyway, or they were right, and it didn’t matter. The film can make me worry about the weather, but it can’t make me worry about D-Day.

That’s an issue I’m not really sure how you get around as a writer. You can tell that Pressure is trying, though, by adding interpersonal conflicts and a possibly dead wife. The interpersonal stuff works well because, unlike D-Day itself, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Does his wife give birth? Do the different countries start to respect each other? We don’t know, and we need to watch the film to find out. It’s a small moment, but it adds so much. That’s probably the smartest thing the film does. If it can’t make me wonder whether D-Day will happen, it can at least make me wonder what happens to the people who are trying to make it happen. The problem is, the film is fighting against history itself. You can put as many arguments, disagreements and personal dramas between the characters as you want, but there’s still a giant historical event looming over everything, telling us roughly how this story ends. Weird to say, but sometimes the biggest problem with history is that we’ve already seen the ending.

That doesn’t make Pressure a bad film. Far from it. The performances are solid, and the film does a good job of making something as potentially boring as weather forecasting feel important. Plus, the pacing is surprisingly good. Even though the whole thing is basically men looking at charts, it never feels slow or boring. Even though, as I said, it’s predictable, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t invested in the characters throughout. I knew what would happen, but I never wanted to leave the room.

As for the performances, there’s not a weak link here. Andrew Scott proves his leading-man chops, although his character is a bit too similar to the sort of roles his Sherlock co-star Benedict Cumberbatch often plays. I’m glad Brendan Fraser’s comeback is continuing; he’s finally getting the kinds of roles he deserves. He’s become an actor who can bring real gravitas and emotional weight to these kinds of roles. He throws himself into it, giving the character the emotional weight the role requires. Surprisingly, I found the best performer to be Kerry Condon. I’ve previously seen her in the MCU (hey, I’m referencing Marvel again) and the haunted swimming pool movie Night Swim. She’s much better in this, giving a performance that carries the historical weight of the story. Her character is basically a side character, but she’s so important to resolving the interpersonal conflicts that you wouldn’t be surprised if the film ended with her winking and floating into the sky with angel wings. Although that may have hurt the historical accuracy.

In terms of directing, Anthony Maras does a decent job. But this is another World War 2 film, and visually, it suffers from the same problem I’ve had with so many others: it all looks incredibly familiar. The storms themselves look dangerous; even the biggest idiot wouldn’t sit there thinking, “but it’s just a bit of rain”. We don’t see a lot of battle scenes; this isn’t that kind of movie. But the ones we do see are horrific, with none of the violence presented as glorious. The scenes of people being shot down en masse are deliberately ugly.

I didn’t know anything about Exercise Tiger. I was much more invested in the brief moments covering it than I was in the D-Day landings. That’s probably because I didn’t know the outcome. There’s something refreshing about being given a piece of history where I can’t sit there mentally ticking off the things I already know are going to happen. It’s the only part of the film that made me sit up and pay attention, because for once I felt like I was actually learning something.

Unfortunately, Pressure can’t completely escape the shadow of the event it’s building towards. It’s essentially a film about whether the weather will allow D-Day to happen, even though we already know that D-Day happened. That’s a pretty sizeable spoiler sitting in the room, and unfortunately it’s wearing a swastika. Still, there is enough here to make Pressure worthwhile. It’s well acted, competently directed, and somehow manages to turn meteorological data into something resembling a thriller. That’s quite an achievement when you consider that the main antagonist is essentially the British weather.

I just wish it had given me a little more of something I hadn’t already seen.

Maybe that’s my own problem. After watching this many World War 2 films, perhaps I’ve developed my own version of superhero fatigue. I don’t need another film to remind me that war is horrible, that ordinary people were put in extraordinary situations, or that the Nazis were bad. I know. I’ve got the message. You can stop giving me the pamphlet. What I do want is a story that makes me curious. Give me the weird little corners of history. Give me the events I’ve never heard of. Give me the people whose stories haven’t already been turned into three films, a miniseries and a prestige television drama. Pressure comes close to that. The weather forecasting gives it an unusual perspective, and the cast makes it easy to spend time with these characters. But ultimately, it is still another film standing on the beach at Normandy, pointing at something I’ve already seen coming from miles away. Plus, the omission of Sverre Petterssen’s work means the film isn’t even as useful as a history lesson as it could have been.

It’s good. It’s interesting. It’s well acted. But I think I’ve finally reached the point where, whenever I see another trailer for a World War 2 film, my only thought is, “Haven’t I already seen this?”

Fall 2 (2026) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: A grieving woman and her late sister’s friend get trapped thousands of feet up on a dangerous mountain plank walk in Thailand after a rockslide destroys the path.

I absolutely loved Fall; it was probably the most tense film I’ve ever watched. I remember watching it, and at one particularly intense moment, a guy sitting nearby stood up, loudly proclaimed, “fuck this”, and walked out. Honestly, I get it. It was an unsettling watch that made my stomach jump constantly (although that could have been the sweet popcorn). So I was incredibly excited by the idea of a sequel.

I was a bit nervous that it was only a few months away from release and there still wasn’t a trailer. Then the trailer came out, and it was… fine. It didn’t blow me away, but mainly because it was so short that it didn’t really showcase much. I figured the finished film would be worth it.

It’s not. I’ll state that up front. It’s nowhere near as good as the first one; it feels like a cheap knock-off. Part of that is because I now have expectations. But part of it is because it’s simply not as good. There are moments where it’s incredible, where you finish a scene and realise just how tightly wound you were while watching it. So it’s not a terrible film, but it isn’t a good one either. There are three main issues: the script, the characters, and the visuals.

The script. The idea for Fall 2 is simple: two characters are trapped on a wooden bridge high up on a mountain. That’s it. Everything is there. It doesn’t need complicating. But it does it anyway. It tries to be clever, adding unnecessary twists and turns.

I’ll talk about one of them because it doesn’t really impact the script, so it’s not a spoiler. Who we thought was called Luce is actually called Billie. She claimed she was a friend of Shiloh (the woman from the first movie, and the sister of Fall 2 protagonist Jax), and it’s a shock to discover that she was actually just a fan. All shocking, all effective. Well, it would be, if any of this had actually mattered before. The fact that Luce is friends with Shiloh is mentioned in dialogue that is so ineffectual it’s basically homoeopathic. There are no conversations about “so what was my sister like at college?”, or discussions of their supposed friendship. There are so many dialogue-heavy scenes that it’s impossible to remember every single thing that was mentioned in passing.

It would be like if I suddenly said: “I absolutely detest sweet popcorn, much preferring salted.” It would mean nothing, because nobody reading this review is going to remember that I mentioned popcorn in the first paragraph. Why would you?

The characters. This was a slight issue in the first film: people taking reasonable decisions for their safety are labelled “not living life”, and standard things to make sure you don’t die are described as “letting fear run your life”. That’s taken to the extreme in this. Especially in a flashback sequence detailing the time Jax and Shiloh went skydiving, and Shiloh pretended to pass out mid-air. When they land, Shiloh does the whole “It was to teach you not to let fear run your life”. No, if you’re skydiving and the person you are trusting to keep you safe passes out, you have every right to be scared, and it’s not unreasonable to be pissed off if it turns out they’re faking it. It’s why parenting books don’t recommend breaking into your kid’s bedroom swinging a chainsaw to teach them about stranger danger. Also, Shiloh’s death doesn’t come up that much. At no point does Jax say, “Yes, I’m scared of falling from heights, but I have a good reason to be; my sister died falling from one”. They mention how her sister didn’t let fear rule her life, how she climbed tall structures with abandon, but don’t mention that it’s that fearlessness that killed her.

Fall 2 also has issues with pacing. It takes seemingly forever for them to actually get to the spot, so it doesn’t even feel like the main part of its own movie. For an idea of how long it takes to get there, the current plot section on the film’s Wikipedia page is 678 words long. It takes over 200 words before we get to “The two women are then left stranded.” The entire section describing the two of them alone is just 232 words.

Finally, the visuals. What worked about the first film was that it was set on a small radio tower. The tower itself was a constant visual reminder that there was nothing between them and the ground. Here, they’re on the edge of a mountain, so most of the shots are the two leads in the foreground, with a huge chunk of rock behind them. You don’t get that same constant reminder of the peril they’re in. There are a few moments where you do see just how high they are, but they’re few and far between.

I also felt the opening was overly stylised, shot more like an action movie than a survival thriller, which detracted from the realism somewhat.

This has all seemed pretty negative, much more so than this film deserves. On its own merits, it’s perfectly fine. It has some incredible shots, and the performances are all good too. My only criticism of the cast is how much Tom Brittney looks like a mix of Tom Ellis and Santino Fontana, but that’s not his fault; it’s just my brain looking for shortcuts.

Harriet Slater and Arsema Thomas are solid leads, only really let down by the script. I get the feeling that if they were scripted as friends, they’d be allowed to be much more natural with each other. As it is, they have to play two strangers, which means there’s only so much chemistry they can show.

In summary, I really wanted to like this. I’m still waiting for the obvious contender for my favourite film of the year, and I hoped Fall 2 would be the one to do it. Instead, it’s a clear favourite for “Most Disappointing”. If this had been released on its own, I’d be much warmer towards it. But when the original Fall had me genuinely considering whether I could stomach another minute of it, it’s hard not to feel let down by a sequel that never comes close to that level of tension.

The mountain in Fall 2 is MUCH higher than the tower from the first one, but the biggest difference in height is the difference in quality between the two. There’s a third movie on the way, featuring the leads from both films, and it looks like it’s set on a snowy mountain. If it follows the same approach as this one, I’m expecting much the same thing, but with added snow and clearer skies – which doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that the visuals will be any more tense.

The Death Of Robin Hood (2026) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: A wounded and ageing Robin Hood retreats to a remote island, where he is forced to confront the violent legacy of his past and the legend he has left behind.

There have been countless adaptations of Robin Hood. Yet, much like King Arthur, the failures far outnumber the successes. My personal favourite? Men In Tights. Robin Hood: Men in Tights, that is. I’m talking about the movie; I’m not saying my favourite thing to see is men in tights. The Death Of Robin Hood (TDORH, pronounced The-door-rah) isn’t even the only Robin Hood movie released this year. I think. There are conflicting reports as to whether The Uprising even counts.

So, how does this compare to other Robin Hoods? Have to say, not well. There’s not much of the Robin Hood you actually know in here. He barely fires an arrow; there’s no Maid Marian, no Merry Men, and he doesn’t even spend any time riding through the glen. Yes, this is a deconstruction of the myth, but I’d like to have seen more of the myth they’re trying to deconstruct. Instead of starting the movie with him killing someone, start with an overly dramatic scene showing a courageous, heroic moment. Let us see him as the hero the myths say he is. Then, later on, show us the reality of that scene. Give us the legend first, so we have something to compare him to.

So that’s it as a Robin Hood movie. How about as a movie on its own merits? Does it work then? Kind of, eventually. But only once he gets to the island. It’s here that the film gets close to showing its potential. It’s atmospheric, haunting, and weirdly beautiful. It’s also where the film finally settles into exploring its themes. The road to get there is far too long, though. As I said, not a fan of the opening third.

It’s also weirdly confusing. Most of the characters look very similar, and the film is lit naturally, with a lot of scenes taking place at night, so it’s hard to figure out who is doing what to whom. You’re constantly having to recalibrate your thoughts about what’s going on. You think someone is being attacked and killed, then it turns out it was another white guy with a beard. It’s a visual mess, and it doesn’t really need to be. Everything in that opening could have been told through flashbacks once he’s already on the island. If Robin Hood wakes up on an island, near death, it would be perfectly believable for him to then explain how he got there.

The entire opening third could even have been told through creative opening credits. They could have tied it into the visual style by telling the story through old-fashioned paintings. Even a voiceover would suffice. This film seems to actively avoid voiceover, to its detriment. It’s like it’s terrified that people may actually understand the film.

The performances are fine. Hugh Jackman is good in the title role, the only negative being that the character draws parallels to his performance in Logan. Bill Skarsgård feels a little wasted in it; I’d have liked to have seen more of him. He’s such a good performer but isn’t really given enough to do here. Jodie Comer is as good as she always is, but the extended opening means she never feels as big a character as some of the others. I was surprised by Faith Delaney. Her performance was tremendously assured and confident for someone so young. I felt sure I’d seen her before, but nope. I think I got her confused with Alisha Weir. The music feels era-appropriate, which I appreciate. Nothing worse than a medieval movie soundtracked by fucking Katy Perry or Eminem.

There’s a lot of interesting ideas in TDORH. But the film never seems confident enough to explore them, preferring the audience to discuss them in the pub afterwards. The idea of myths being more powerful than truth is an interesting one. Maybe we should have seen that. Maybe we should have seen how, despite being a monster, he did inspire people to rise against oppression. The closest we get is Brigid responding to her family’s deaths at the hands of RH by deciding to dedicate her life to healing others. But that idea is said so briefly that it doesn’t really have any weight. We don’t even need something that complicated; even seeing other people tell the story would work. Cut between different groups of people telling the tale of Robin Hood around small fires, showing how his myth lives on.

It approaches guilt in much the same way, flirting with it but not being able to fuck it when they get to bed. It is aware the concepts are there; you can tell that much. In the end, it just feels like a thesis, a proposal, a writer saying, “These are the themes we want to explore,” then forgetting to actually do so.

I would mention how the villain is portrayed, but there’s not really one. There are various people who want to kill Robin, but no big bad. There’s nobody he fears or dreads. Really, the only villain is his own past. The whole “man versus self” narrative is valid, but we need to believe he’s genuinely at war with himself. He doesn’t seem broken enough as a character for that to work. This goes back to what I said about the theme of guilt; the exploration of it is paper-thin. We’re told he’s haunted by it, but he doesn’t seem to be.

This is another reason I think the opening third was unnecessary. We see him brutally kill people, with the implication being that he does this a lot. Yet we’re supposed to believe that he’s haunted by the deaths he’s caused? Compare this to The Odyssey, where Odysseus clearly carried the burden of his past. There’s not even a turning point as to why Robin feels this way. He doesn’t come face to face with the consequences of his brutality. Yes, people try to kill him, but they’ve been trying for a while, so that’s not a change which happens in the film. It needed a “wow, I’m a shit” moment.

The ending is fine. He dies. I’m not putting a spoiler warning because it’s in the title of the movie. And it’s what it should be: powerful, emotive, and with an air of redemption. Yes, it would have been nice if his death had some purpose, if he died defending the island from someone coming to take revenge on him. But there is something nice about how it feels like he just gives up. He’s old, he’s tired, and he’s looking after fucking children. It’s not a warrior dying on his sword, because the film recognises he doesn’t have the nobility required for that. It’s an old farm dog wandering out into the cold to be at peace.

It’s one of the few moments where the insistence on deviating from the legend helps it. The rest of the time, it feels so determined to avoid what we’ve seen before that it fails to present anything worthwhile. It doesn’t provide us with a villain to root against. It doesn’t provide us with a look at the country at the time, so we can understand why someone like him might become a legend. And it doesn’t tell us how his myth permeates among ordinary people. It’s so scared of being standard, it ends up being hollow.

I remember watching Avatar: The Way of Water in the cinema years ago. Just after the moment which should have been the ending, but was actually the bit before the closing section, I saw someone get their phone out. Ordinarily, this annoys the hell out of me, but in that instance all I could think was, “Yeah, fair enough.”

Something similar happened here. There was someone in the room who was asleep; I know this because he was snoring loudly. Whoever he went with felt no need to wake him up. Nothing I put in this review will sum up this movie better than that.

This should be great; it should change how we see the character. As it is, it’s just okay. If Uprising does actually turn out to be about Robin Hood, I can already tell I’m going to get the two movies mixed up. Deconstructions of this nature should be unique and unforgettable; they should not be as bland as this is.

It’s better than some of the other recent attempts at the character, but in a few years, when I’m on Pointless and I’m asked to name actors who have played Robin Hood, I can guarantee Hugh Jackman would be a low scorer.

Deep Water (2026) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: A plane crashes in shark-infested waters. Well, not really infested; they live there.

This is the third film I’ve reviewed this year about sharks. That’s weird. The entire film is full of people who should be beyond this sort of film by now. Ben Kingsley and Aaron Eckhart onscreen, with Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) directing. Downside, Gene Simmons is involved. Not entirely sure why, but he gives me the ick. The performances are fine. Aaron Eckhart constantly switches from being on the cusp of greatness to being a “straight-to-TV” actor. He’s definitely an actor who’s aided by a good script. Ben Kingsley is doing the standard “dramatic actor who dies early”—oh, spoilers, I guess. Molly Belle Wright is much better than a child actress without a Wikipedia page should be.

I said earlier that Eckhart is aided by a good script. He’s not helped here. It’s not that the script is bad; it’s just not that exciting. It’s not that well-crafted. You can see the strings too clearly. There’s a difference between foreshadowing and flat-out telling people what’s going to happen. Deep Water keeps presenting things that could be exciting, nay, should be exciting, but nope. Plane crash? Great premise. Sharks? Great premise. Survivors trapped together? Great premise. Conflicting personalities? Great premise. Limited resources? Great premise. Put all of those things together, and you should have a pretty reliable survival thriller.

Instead, it feels like the film has all the ingredients but hasn’t quite worked out the recipe. There are some good sequences, particularly the plane crash, and Harlin clearly knows how to stage large-scale action. There are moments where you can see the much better film hiding underneath this one. But every time it looks like it’s about to become that film, it pulls back and settles for something much more generic.

As I said, it’s not a bad movie. But there’s not a lot to recommend it for. It could have been made at any time over the last 20 years, and it would have been the same movie, probably with the same main cast too. The big change would be the portable batteries in the airline hold. It’s interesting that the plane crash isn’t caused by terrorists, but by customers not adhering to safety protocols. Just the kind of thing I want to see before I fly in a few weeks’ time; very comforting.

The plane crash itself is pretty damn good, and shows what Harlin is capable of. It’s dynamic, large-scale, and exactly the kind of thing a film like this needs. It is a little too long, though. It’s clearly the main centrepiece of the movie. So it’s baffling to see another crash near the end. We’ve already seen a really good plane crash; we don’t need a lesser one near the end. It feels like a studio note: there isn’t enough action here, so let’s have another crash. They can’t expect audiences to stay just for the characters.

The characters could only be flatter if they were two-dimensional. They’re introduced so quickly that you don’t really feel like you’ve met them. There’s a lot of shorthand characterisation, as if the script doesn’t realise you don’t need to get EVERY character trait in the opening scene. It has 106 minutes to show us who these people are. They’re not even characters; they’re archetypes.

This becomes a problem as the film goes on. People get in danger; people die. But you’d be hard-pressed to remember which ones. Obviously, people dying is bad. But we’re not told why we should care whether THESE particular people live or die. I genuinely can’t remember who died or how they died. There are a lot of opportunities for unique and fun deaths. Deep Water doesn’t take any of them.

Clearly, the sharks are the selling point. But they’re not a consistent enough presence. There are long stretches where the film seems to forget it has sharks in it. It’s not necessarily an issue to hold the sharks back sometimes; anticipation can be incredibly powerful (look at the first Alien movie or Jaws). But for that to work, the rest of the film has to be interesting, and this isn’t.

It would have been so easy with some small changes. Reduce the characters and flesh them out so that the relationships matter. Plot out the danger beats differently so it feels consistent, with no breathing room between them. It’s a shame because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the basic idea. “People survive a plane crash only to discover they’re surrounded by sharks” is the kind of wonderfully stupid premise that I want to work. You don’t need to reinvent cinema. You just need to make the situation increasingly horrible and put some entertaining characters in the middle of it. It should be bombastic; it should be fun. What it shouldn’t be is what it ends up being: boring.

It would have been so easy with some small changes. Reduce the characters and flesh them out so that the relationships matter. Plot out the danger beats differently so the danger feels more consistent and keeps escalating. It’s a shame because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the basic idea. “People survive a plane crash only to discover they’re surrounded by sharks” is the kind of wonderfully stupid premise that I want to work. You don’t need to reinvent cinema. You just need to make the situation increasingly horrible and put some entertaining characters in the middle of it. It should be bombastic; it should be fun. What it shouldn’t be is what it ends up being: boring.

As I said, it’s not poorly made; it’s just bland. And I feel like that’s worse.

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (2025) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: Two hapless friends and aspiring musicians accidentally travel back in time to 2008 while trying to pull off a scheme to book a gig at a real-life Toronto music venue. Based on a web series, nothing to do with Kurt Cobain

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (NTBTSTM, pronounced Not-bot-tis-tum) is based on a web series and TV show that I’ve never seen. This could end badly for me. Humour is subjective enough without walking into a film that’s potentially packed with years’ worth of in-jokes and references I don’t understand. And then there’s the fact that it’s Canadian. There was every chance I’d spend the entire thing wondering what the hell everyone was talking about.

I mean, all of those things could still be true. But if they are, they were done skillfully enough that I didn’t notice. This is not a subtle movie. In fact, it’s about as far from subtle as you can get. At one point, a character says, “This whole 2008 sequence, which would be very hard to fake if this were not 2008, will not be filmed.” That’s not so much winking at the audience as batting eyelashes, buying them a drink and asking if they’d like to come back to theirs. And I love it. The film knows exactly how ridiculous it is and leans into that as hard as it possibly can. It kind of has to. If it played things straight, it wouldn’t be nearly as funny. And it is funny. Incredibly so at times. Some of the dialogue and situations are so absurd that you can’t help but laugh.

I can tell I liked it because I managed to get over a pretty big hurdle. I don’t think he normally does, but in this movie, Jay McCarrol REALLY looked like a guy I grew up on the same street as. This guy once beat the shit out of a kid and flushed his head down the toilet. You’d think that would be some kind of classroom hijinks. Nope. The dude was in his 30s at the time. Naturally, this led to me Googling what he’s up to now. I think he’s dead. Apparently, he died by suicide. For a lot of films, that would be enough to permanently ruin an actor’s face for me. Here, it barely registered. And then there’s Matt Johnson, who was in Matt and Mara, a film I detest partly because I should have loved it but didn’t. So yeah, the fact that this film managed to overcome both of those hurdles says quite a lot.

Not that it’s a great movie. The pacing is a chore, and sometimes it feels like a genuine struggle to get through. The narrative could be tighter, too. There is an overall story in there somewhere, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting about it at times. The original web series episodes were between 10 and 20 minutes, while the TV show episodes were roughly 22 minutes apiece. I don’t think they’ve quite worked out how to stretch that into a feature. It puts me in mind of Moana 2, which was originally supposed to be a miniseries before they merged the different episodes into a movie. The result was something that felt episodic and disjointed. There’s a similar thing here. It feels like a series of skits rather than a cohesive narrative.

That being said, I admire creativity, and this definitely has that. The way they use unsuspecting members of the public to drive the story through their interactions with the performers is genius. If you know what’s happening, you can spot it. But if you don’t, it just looks like incredibly clever foreshadowing. That’s the kind of thing I really appreciate in a film: something that is genuinely impressive once you know how it was done, but still works perfectly well if you don’t.

NTBTSTM is not among the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. But it is a lot of fun. More importantly, it made me want to watch the TV show. I’m sure there are running jokes and references I didn’t catch, and once I’ve seen the show, I’ll inevitably have to come back to this and watch it again with the missing context. If a film can make someone who has never seen its source material want to go back and explore it, I’d say that’s a success.

Coyote Vs. Acme (2026) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: After years of failure, Wile. E Coyote decides to sue Acme over their products failures to aid him in eating a bird.

In the last few years, it’s become increasingly obvious that people judge films by their context. I try to avoid doing that in my reviews; I think a lot of films that are negatively reviewed and dismissed as “woke” are films nobody would have been particularly bothered by if they’d been released before the Internet Bad Times. But sometimes context is impossible to ignore. It’s difficult to enjoy a film if you can’t separate the actor from their sex crimes. Similarly, part of my dislike for Ella McCay was that I thought it was socially irresponsible to make a film about US politics in 2025 and have it be utterly toothless. I’m mentioning that for two reasons: 1) to fill my word count (which doesn’t matter because I don’t have a prescribed word count; it’s just “write until I run out of ideas”); and 2) because the context of CvA’s release is vitally important.

For those unaware, the film was completed in 2023, then Warner Bros. cancelled it for tax reasons/because they’re assholes (my editor made me refrain from using the c-word there, but in my opinion it would be fully deserved), alongside Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt (although the latter two were still in post-production). Clearly, WB decided to focus on high-quality films that would enhance their reputation. Films like Joker: Folie à Deux, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (the film that redefined how to do a sequel to a film where one of the main characters is a paedophile, and that’s not a compliment), and the nepo-film of the century, Trap. The decision was baffling, especially since early reviews were positive. Highly so, in fact. Some people were even calling it one of the best animated movies in recent memory. CvA was eventually saved by distributor Ketchup Entertainment, to the relief of everybody who likes good movies (so, presumably, nobody who works at Warner Bros.).

So it’s fair to say expectations were high. Does it meet them? Early reviews indicate yes. But those are professional reviewers; I’m not. I don’t give a shit about a lot of films that “proper” reviewers care about, and there are plenty of times when our opinions differ.

Not here though. CvA is a joy. It put me in mind of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but with fewer scenes that will traumatise you or turn you on. It’s genuinely heartwarming at times. It’s not exactly a complex movie, but there’s considerably more going on beneath the cartoon chaos than you’d expect. Beyond the obvious cartoon stuff, there’s a story about the dangers of corporate capitalism, what makes a conscious being deserving of rights, and the tragic tale of Sisyphus. That’s not exactly surprising, though. People have this misguided idea that Shrek was the first kids’ movie that had higher concepts and jokes for adults to understand, yet Looney Tunes has been doing that kind of thing for years. Bugs Bunny has been a lot of people’s first introduction to classical music for decades. Bugs Bunny wasn’t sitting around waiting for Shrek to show up and give him permission to be funny to adults. Looney Tunes has always been perfectly happy to put something ridiculous in front of children while also slipping in references that they’re not expected to understand. CvA feels like it actually understands that rather than trying to replicate the formula of modern animated films and occasionally putting a fart joke in to prove it’s still fun.

That attitude is why CvA is not just a great kids’ movie, but a great movie. I say that having looked around the screening and realised how many childless adults were there. It wasn’t exactly a cinema full of parents being dragged along by their children; there were a surprising number of us who had apparently chosen to spend two hours watching Wile E. Coyote sue ACME entirely of our own free will. CvA works because it operates under the assumption that kids aren’t idiots, while recognising that parents are the ones buying the tickets and need to be entertained too. Crucially, it’s not cynical; there’s no dark mysterious undertone. It’s also not ashamed of being a Looney Tunes movie. There’s a tendency with some films based on properties like this to make them too self-aware or retcon everything to make them darker. CvA just lets the characters be themselves. The closest it gets to a Cerebus-style reinterpretation is implying that Daffy Duck’s behaviour is because ACME drove him mad.

The film does expand the characters, though. That’s to be expected with the increased runtime. Coyote is no longer a two-dimensional villain. The character has spent most of his existence being defined by one thing: trying to eat the Road Runner. That’s basically it. He’s not exactly Tony Soprano in terms of character development. Giving him a proper personality works, and you actually feel sorry for him. He’s been repeatedly sold products by ACME that are either defective or catastrophically dangerous, and rather than anyone asking why the company is allowed to continue operating, everyone just accepts that Wile E. is an idiot. At some point you have to wonder whether this is actually a Road Runner problem or whether the coyote has just been the victim of one of the longest-running corporate scams in history. He’s sympathetic, vulnerable, and, importantly, he’s allowed to be right. There’s an actual injustice here. Watching Coyote fight against injustice adds a lot of emotional weight, more than you’d expect from a film based on short films where the punchline was usually “gravity”.

The performances? John Cena is perfect for stuff like this. His comically serious demeanour suits the ridiculousness of the film. I mean, he’s basically a cartoon anyway. Surprisingly, Will Forte brings the drama. More so than I expected. He seems genuinely beaten down by life, almost as if he’s spent decades pushing a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down again. He adds a sincerity to Coyote that would otherwise be lacking. I kind of loved Lana Condor. This is the third film I’ve seen her in this year, and the first one I’ve positively reviewed. She shows a warmth that was missing from the previous films. She wasn’t in it long, but I loved Kristen K. Berg as the court reporter. She kind of reminded me of Sarah Baker.

Those performances are helped by the script. It’s incredibly sincere. Beneath the standard cartoon jokes, there’s a story about someone being told his suffering doesn’t matter because of who he is. Not many animated films tackle this kind of complex philosophical debate, and even fewer would do it at a time when we’re increasingly likely to have debates about whether robots deserve rights while still denying those rights to people who are non-white or part of the LGBTQ+ community. It’s not the main thesis of the film, but it does underlie a lot of the characters’ motivations and narrative choices.

It’s also surprisingly anti-corporate. ACME is exaggerated, but compared to companies in the real world, not by that much. In-universe, ACME is a company that can sell you something that kills you through negligence, then refuse to accept responsibility. Meanwhile, in the real world, aircraft manufacturers can ignore safety concerns which lead to the deaths of hundreds of people, and have their main punishment be a fine that’s a fraction of the money saved by ignoring those concerns. It’s not exactly subtle, but in modern times we need stuff that’s unsubtle.

That depiction of large corporations has only become more relevant when you consider how Warner Bros. treated the film. It’s a film about a corporation screwing over an individual because it has enough money and power to do so. The film itself was nearly denied an audience because a massive corporation decided it was financially more convenient to make it disappear. I’m sure somebody at Warner Bros. has already explained why this isn’t ironic. I’m also sure their explanation involved the words “strategic” and “content”, which means I don’t want to hear it. Their actions only made the message of the film feel more relevant. It’s like when a guy argues he’s not violent, and if you say he is, he’ll punch you in the face.

That’s probably why the emotional stuff works. Underneath all the jokes, this is a story about somebody who has spent his entire life losing and finally deciding that he’s had enough. It’s not particularly complicated, but it doesn’t need to be. Sometimes a simple story works better than one with twelve twists, three cinematic universes and a post-credits scene teasing a spin-off that nobody asked for.

The Sisyphus references are obvious, but they’re also explained in case you’re not too familiar with Greek mythology. There will be people who learn about that tale through this movie. Whilst also learning how corporations suck. What more could you want from a film like this?

Even without the background noise of its production and release, this is still worth paying attention to. The early reviews were right. Annoyingly, sometimes critics actually know what they’re talking about. Coyote vs. Acme is great. Not “great considering it was almost cancelled”, not “great for a film based on a cartoon”, and not “great if you’re a fan of Looney Tunes”. Just great. It’s funny, it’s surprisingly sweet, it has more going on beneath the surface than I expected, and it manages to make a film about Wile E. Coyote suing ACME feel like a completely reasonable thing to spend two hours watching. The biggest problem with the film is therefore also the biggest problem with its release: I wish I’d been able to watch it sooner. Warner Bros. spent years sitting on a film that people actually wanted to see, while releasing films that made plenty of people wonder whether they’d accidentally walked into the wrong cinema. I don’t know what the exact financial calculations were, and frankly I don’t care. I’m a film reviewer, not an accountant. If your decision means I get to watch Trap instead of Wile E. Coyote suing ACME, I think I’m entitled to conclude that somebody, somewhere, has made a terrible mistake.

It’s not often that I finish a film about a cartoon character whose primary achievement is repeatedly running into walls and think, “That was considerably better than it had any right to be.” But here we are. And after everything this film went through just to be released, perhaps Wile E. Coyote finally got the one thing he’s been trying to get his entire life.

A win.

The Devil’s Mouth (2026) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: A group of college friends on vacation in Thailand take a reckless detour into a remote underwater cave system and must fight for survival after becoming trapped with a ravenous bull shark.

I’m going to start this review with some praise. The opening does a fantastic job of establishing the characters very quickly. I haven’t seen such an effective introduction to a group of characters since the opening scene of Friends. I have many issues with that show, but go back and watch that opening scene: within minutes, you instantly understand EVERYBODY’s personality and sense of humour. It’s remarkably efficient.

I also like that this doesn’t immediately present itself as a survival thriller. It starts like a normal, fun movie. I love a good genre fake-out. People don’t live in genres, and I think films sometimes forget that. If you establish immediately that you’re watching a horror or survival thriller, audiences start questioning why characters are behaving like normal people. “Why’s she opening that door? There’s definitely a killer in there.” Whereas if you establish it as an ordinary day, you don’t question someone opening a door because, well, why would you? People open doors. That’s what doors are for.

Not gonna lie, I watched this almost entirely because of Kathryn Newton. She’s appeared in some of my favourite 7–8/10 movies of the last few years: Lady Bird, Three Billboards, Blockers, Freaky, Abigail and Ready Or Not 2. So I was pretty happy to see her attached. Then I looked at the director. Jeff Wadlow wrote Fantasy Island, Truth Or Dare, Imaginary and Bloodshot, and directed all of those except Bloodshot. The highest I regard any of those films is Imaginary, and even that is, at best, a 3/10 movie, with its biggest strength being that it doesn’t put enough effort into being actively shit.

The Devil’s Mouth (which is what preachers call a vagina) is not a bad movie. It’s definitely the strongest movie Wadlow has made in a while. But that’s damning with faint praise somewhat, because it’s not exactly good. It’s homoeopathic filmmaking; there’s nothing to it, and you’ll forget it soon after watching. Proof of this is that I watched it two weeks ago and yet it wasn’t even on my list of films to review. I just forgot to add it. I also made minimal notes while watching it; that’s how little there is to say about it.

The stuff I do remember? It’s not good. One moment in particular stands out. A character says, “That’s not the first time her tiny bladder has caused mayhem”, and then the film randomly cuts to a scene much later where people are fire dancing. Was the tiny bladder line really so necessary? It felt like a quippy on-set improvisation that somehow survived all the way through filming, editing and the final cut. Surely at some point, a seasoned director should have watched that back and thought, “We can probably lose the bit about the piss.”

As expected, Newton is fantastic; she always is. The score, composed by Bear McCreary, is better than this movie deserves. And the visuals are genuinely impressive. Wadlow knows how to shoot scenery in a way that makes you stop and admire it. The freshwater caves look incredible. Sadly, that’s the only fresh thing this film provides. Everything else is bland. The sharks have no aura around them whatsoever, to the point that you almost forget they’re even there for most of the movie.

And that’s a problem. There are sharks in this movie, but it never feels like you’re watching a shark movie. It feels like you’re watching a film where sharks occasionally make appearances. There’s no “holy shit, sharks!” It’s more “oh look, sharks again.” They never feel like they’re lurking somewhere, waiting for the opportunity to attack. It feels like they’re at home with their fins up, watching TV and waiting patiently for the film to tell them it’s time to come back.

The survival aspect doesn’t fare much better. There’s a decent premise buried underneath everything: people trapped in an underwater cave system while something very large and very hungry (a shark, not me) is swimming around them. That’s a concept that should basically write its own tension. But the film rarely does anything particularly interesting with it. The characters make the obvious decisions, encounter the obvious obstacles and survive the obvious near-deaths. It’s all perfectly functional, but nothing ever made me think, “Oh shit, how are they getting out of this?” More to the point, I didn’t particularly care if they didn’t.

And the characters, despite that excellent opening, don’t really get much more interesting once the film starts. That makes the opening almost frustrating in retrospect, because it proves the movie can establish characters efficiently. It just doesn’t do much with them afterwards. I knew who these people were within minutes, but by the end I didn’t particularly care about any of them beyond wanting them to survive because, well, they’re the characters in the movie.

There’s also a weird lack of escalation. A survival thriller should keep tightening the screws. Things should get progressively worse until you’re wondering how the hell anyone is going to get out. Here, the film feels strangely flat. It has danger, but it doesn’t really build dread. There’s a difference between “this is dangerous” and “I really don’t want to know what’s around that corner”, and The Devil’s Mouth rarely reaches the latter. Nothing ever feels like it leads to anything else. It’s not story progression, it’s just stuff happening.

Which is a shame, because there are flashes of a much better movie here. The caves genuinely look fantastic, the premise is solid, Newton is excellent, and that opening demonstrates that the writers know how to establish a group of characters without spending twenty minutes giving everyone tragic backstories. There are enough good ingredients here that I can understand why someone might have a good time with it. I just didn’t.

It’s not offensively bad. It’s not even particularly boring. It’s simply incredibly there. It’s a cinematic skirting board. You appreciate the craftsmanship, but it’s not something you pay attention to or remember once you’ve left the room. And considering this is a film about people trapped in a cave with sharks, “yeah, that was fine” is probably the least appropriate reaction it could possibly have inspired.

Kathryn Newton deserves better. Bear McCreary’s score deserves better. Those caves deserve better. The sharks deserve better. Jeff Wadlow deserves a mentor.

I suppose on the plus side, it is the best of the three shark movies I’ve seen this year (Thrash, reviewed here. And Deep Water, reviewed nowhere yet because I haven’t written it, I can’t review everything at once, get off my back). But again, that’s not saying much. Weirdly, all three have been direct-to-streaming. And there’s probably a reason for that.

Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma (2026) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: Kris, a 29-year-old filmmaker, is hired to resurrect and reboot the tired Camp Miasma slasher franchise for modern audiences. Wanting to pay tribute to the original, she tracks down the actress from the original; shit gets weird.

I have a somewhat complex history with the work of Jane Schoenbrun. I think she’s one of the best filmmakers around today. Her use of colour is among the best in the business. The way she weaves metaphor and storytelling into the shots is a thing of wonder. I always leave her movies feeling slightly like I’ve been hypnotised and entranced. That being said, I’m not a fan of her scripts. They always start promising but end up just on the wrong side of incomprehensibility, although I suspect cohesion and understanding aren’t really the point. I’m aware that this, more than almost any other criticism, is deeply personal and subjective. Some people will love it BECAUSE of that, because the audience is constantly wrong-footed and left in a state of confusion. Personally, I don’t mind being confused; I just want a place in the narrative to ground myself

If you loved her previous work, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma (TSADACM, pronounced Tee-Sad-At-Cam) won’t dissuade you from being a fan; if you don’t like it, this won’t change your mind. Everything that works about her previous films is now better in this. The shots are better, the music is incredible, and the performances are outstanding. Schoenbrun knows how to make a killer playlist, helped enormously by a returning Alex G. There’s a great selection of danceable synth pop for you to sink your teeth into. Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson have a chemistry that leaps off the screen. From the moment they first meet, there seems to be a magnetic pull between them, like the universe is begging them to kiss. They are helped by how unbelievably horny the script is. There’s an air of unashamed sexuality over the entire thing; arguably the sex is more important than the death. The supporting characters are all fine, but none are as fully fleshed out as those two, so the actors aren’t really given as much of a chance to shine.

It feels like a deeply personal story for Schoenbrun. Much like her previous work, this feels like she’s writing it as an exploration of her own personality, rather than worrying too much about whether the audience can follow along. It’s her examining her own sexual desires and feelings. And that’s fine, but if you do something like that, you have to be aware that it won’t fully land with everybody. Every time I felt I knew what was happening, the film was determined to throw me off. I’m still not sure whether the ending actually happened, was a fantasy, an alternate universe, or a dying thought. There’s a moment where the switch from “believable and understandable” to “confusion and oddness” happens, and it’s so abrupt that it becomes genuinely jarring.

So far, this review has probably seemed fairly negative, and it’s not meant to. There’s a lot to like about TSADACM. It has one of my favourite openings I’ve seen all year. The opening credits set up how Miasma is regarded in this world, complete with reviews, initial analysis, its place in pop culture, and how it’s viewed in modern society. There are multiple references to classic cinema, and problematic histories that a lot of long-running franchises have, especially when it came to how they treated characters who weren’t cisgender, straight white men. Fans of cinema and film theory will get a lot more out of some of the dialogue than casual viewers probably will.

So, is the in-universe movie believable? Kind of. Weirdly, Camp Miasma (the in-universe movie) has the exact opposite problem that Camp Miasma (the movie we’re watching, which I’ll refer to as TSADACM for clarity’s sake) has. The writing, characters and backstories of Camp Miasma feel convincingly rooted in the 80s. Yet the filmmaking itself definitely feels modern. If anything, Schoenbrun feels TOO good a director to make a believable, slightly terrible 80s slasher. Her use of camera movement and music is too advanced and slick for it to work. It pulled me out of the movie a little bit, despite the scene itself being incredible. If an 80s movie had used some of Schoenbrun’s techniques, it wouldn’t just have been good; it would have changed the genre. It’s the musical equivalent of Green Day attempting to make a ramshackle 70s punk record. Even without trying, they’d do things that wouldn’t have been done back then, either because the technology wasn’t available or because nobody had thought of doing them yet. Put all of that together on one album, and it would inevitably be too much

Gonna be honest, I’m still not entirely sure what genre this would fit into. It doesn’t really feel like horror so much as a video thesis ABOUT horror that uses horror scenes to illustrate its point. So you can’t really judge it like you would a traditional horror movie, by examining the villain, the scares, etc. I guess the closest I can think of would be *deep breath* Surrealsexual Romantic Psychological Thriller. It’s definitely unique, and for that alone it’s worth your time and money.

This is one of only two films I’ve paid to see in the last few years, and I watched it at the Curzon, which isn’t cheap. Plus it was on my birthday, and I was on my own. It had everything working against it, and I still want to see it again.

I should note that I’m not exactly the person these themes are aimed at. I love that films like this exist; it’s clearly going to be VERY important to someone, potentially even someone who feels seen by it in a way they haven’t felt seen before. But to me? I admire it and want to study it more than I like it. This wasn’t made with someone like me in mind, but it doesn’t need to be. It feels like it’s aimed at the confused teens (and adults) who need more films like this, and I think they’ll love it. Of course, I haven’t actually spoken to any people about this film, so for all I know, I’m woefully off the fucking mark.

Although there is one important thing to note, especially after what I just said. I don’t really feel comfortable explicitly stating what I’m about to say, so I’ll try to work around it. A few years ago, for my end-of-year awards, I noticed that EVERY film in the “most me” category had a female lead. It led me to ask myself a few questions about why that was, and whether those were questions I should actually talk to someone about. I did have a discussion with some friends, and they encouraged me to explore it further, many of them speaking from their own personal experiences. I never really got anywhere with those questions, but they haven’t entirely gone away either. So there’s something increasingly strange about the fact that TSADACM is almost certainly going to win the award this year. It’s another film that feels intensely, uncomfortably close to me in a way that I don’t entirely know how to explain. And every time that happens, I get a little closer to HAVING to ask myself those questions again.

The Testament Of Ann Lee (2025) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: A musical biopic about Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers.

I didn’t know much about The Testament Of Ann Lee (TTOAL, pronounced like Tee-total if you slightly miss the final t), I just knew it was highly regarded, and it involved religion in some way. I can see why people like it. It feels very much like an “important” movie. It’s incredibly well-crafted, and from a technical standpoint, it’s hard to criticise it.

But I’m still gonna. Really, most of my criticism is based on how they tell the story. It’s a (according to Wikipedia) “historical musical drama”. Musicals are weirdly viewed. They’re seen as “fun”: bright colours, big emotions and joy. There are some which are high-concept and serious (Les Misérables, Annette, The End), but they’re few and far between, and, with the exception of Les Misérables, they aren’t the musicals that really penetrate popular culture.

I’m not opposed to serious musicals, but I think there’s a fundamental flaw in using the format for a biography. Because of the inherently theatrical nature of musicals, biographies don’t always suit the style. It’s hard to suspend disbelief when everybody suddenly breaks into song. You’re never really given a chance to think, “Wow, this really happened,” because the music keeps reminding you that you’re watching a constructed performance. You know the singing didn’t happen, so your brain finds it difficult to accept that everything else did too.

It’s different when it’s a biopic of a musician, because music is naturally part of their story. But a religious person? It’s odd. TTOAL gets around this somewhat by making the music extremely religious, almost choral. But that creates another problem: a lot of the songs start to sound very similar. To be fair, they’re somewhat limited by the subject matter. It would be pretty strange if the characters suddenly started rapping or performing opera.

It starts off well. It lets you know very quickly that the religious themes will be heavy, as will the weirdness. There’s also some really good music. It’s an odd experience watching a film and not being entirely sure whether it’s a horror film or a biography. I like it, though. At the very least, it shows ambition. It immediately changes the expectations of anyone who went in expecting a standard musical.

The performances are all great. Some reviewers have described it as the best performance Amanda Seyfried has ever given. I disagree, preferring her performance in the criminally underrated The Last Word. Her performance in TTOAL is certainly more difficult, because of the added pressure of singing, but I felt she was more natural in The Last Word. They’re two very different roles with very different demands, though, so perhaps it’s unfair to compare them. The more obvious comparison is her performance as Cosette in Les Misérables. She’s MILES better in Ann Lee. She makes a very good Ann Lee. I like her when she’s Ann Lee. (That joke only works if you say it like “angry” in the Incredible Hulk voice.)

The supporting cast are similarly good, although I found myself more interested in some of the performances than in the characters themselves. This is partly because the film is so committed to its style. Everyone feels like they’re performing in the same strange religious nightmare, which is presumably the point, but it does make it difficult to become attached to individual characters. They’re often there to represent an idea as much as they’re there to be people.

I didn’t even notice Christopher Abbott or Shannon Woodward, despite both having appeared in two of my hidden gem picks from the last few decades. I’d actually made a point of keeping an eye out for them in future works.

Ultimately, my biggest issue was that I never really fully bought into the premise. I recognised that what I was watching was powerful and important, but I never felt that it was powerful and important myself. The story is inherently difficult to dramatise. The story of Ann Lee is, to a large extent, about what she felt; this means the film spends a lot of time dealing with ideas and concepts rather than events. For a biography, I don’t think I learnt much about her or her life. I remember that she was born on the 29th of February, but that’s about it.

On the positive side, it’s ambitious. And I’d much rather watch a film like that than something lazy. When I watch a film, I can sometimes find myself thinking, “Does the writer/director NEED to make this?” and the answer is usually lacking. But this? I can see why someone needs to make this. That shines through in every scene. So much effort has been put into everything: the production design, the costumes, the music. They all feel like they’re combining as part of a decisive vision. Even when I didn’t necessarily like the choices, I understood the decisions behind them.

Maybe that’s the frustrating part. I didn’t dislike it. I just didn’t connect with it as much as I needed to in order to really enjoy it. I completely understand why someone would see this as a five-star movie (7 stars in the Tokyo Dome). But it didn’t work for me. Maybe that’s because there was no part of me that was particularly interested in Ann Lee or the Shakers (which would be a great name for a ’60s band). Before the film, I had no interest in learning about them, and after the film, I still have no interest.

TTOAL is ambitious, technically impressive and often genuinely beautiful. Amanda Seyfried is excellent, the music is strong, and there’s enough weirdness here to make it stand out from the endless stream of conventional biopics. But I think the same theatricality that makes it distinctive also creates its biggest weakness. I was always conscious that I was watching a film about Ann Lee rather than feeling like I was witnessing her life. I never suspended my disbelief enough to become fully invested.

Perhaps that’s an unfair criticism of a musical. But if you’re going to make a musical about a religious figure rather than a musician, you’re already asking the audience to make a pretty substantial leap. TTOAL makes that leap confidently. It just didn’t always land where it wanted me to.