Starring: Vanessa Dubasso, Elsie Hewitt
Director: Max Rissman
Country: USA
UK Release: Amazon
When Molly (Dubasso) goes to hookup with Irene (Hewitt), she isn’t expecting to find a repressed lesbian, struggling to reconcile her sexuality with her faith. They don’t hit it off, but unbeknownst to them both, the flat is slowly filling with carbon monoxide and they fall unconscious. Their souls awaken from their bodies, meeting on an astral plane that allows them to talk, but not to leave their bodies behind. So as they wait for someone to discover what has happened to them both, the mismatched pair are trapped together indefinitely in this house.
What follows is over an hour of talking, ruminating and learning to understand each other. Molly’s hard exterior begins to soften, while Irene begins to accept herself a little bit more. But for a film with such a high concept, we are subjected to a very long sequence of “characters just talking in rooms”, which is a format that only really works when the stakes are really high. And, at this point, the stakes really aren’t. Their talking isn’t going to save them from the carbon monoxide, after all.
Then in the final act, this all gives way to a wild finale with some outlandish Goosebumps-esque supernatural craziness that arrives like a bolt from the blue. Where the bulk of the narrative is a contemplative character drama, its ending is a far-fetched genre movie that needs you to suspend your disbelief a LOT. Subsequently this feels like two completely different films stitched together to create a weird episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, bad VFX included.
UK Release: 14th February 2025 on VOD, streaming on platforms including Amazon, Fandango & Tello
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