(IMAGE: My True Fairytale LLC)
Purplelight Pictures. 2021. Drama/Mystery/Thriller. 86 minutes.
RATING: 1.5 / 4
Following a dramatic car crash, 17 year-old Angie Goodwin (Emma Kennedy) resolves to achieve her highly mixed-metaphor fantasy of being a superhero in a fairy tale. And she determines to save the world. But in her more immediate surroundings, her friends and family who haven’t seen her since the crash keep looking for her body. Individual relatives have encounters with her, ranging from visions to full-on conversations, but she asks that they stay secret. All the while she moves mysteriously rapidly across the country and arranges convenient chains of coincidences to help push the people she knows into situations where they’ll have to learn from and talk to each other. Is she actually alive, or is this a Carnival of Souls-type situation? Or perhaps mass delusion?
Here’s a hint: writer-director D. Mitry actually did lose his 17 year-old daughter to a car crash, and this movie is his way of working through it. So don’t expect Angie to develop super powers of the monster-punching, villain-busting variety. As her anti-social, failed musician father Dean (Darri Ingolfsson, of Alice in Chains’ longform Black Antenna web series) risks ruining a potential relationship with way-out-of-his-league Renee (Taylor Cole), and grandparents Bruce Davison and Joanna Cassidy wait for any news, everyone in their orbit with generation gap issues encounters mysterious coincidences offering enlightenment.
It may seem hard to invest in the grief of primary characters while the story is seriously hedging its bets on whether the character they’re mourning is actually dead. But the same is true in real life before a body is found – a person may want to grieve, but just doesn’t know yet if it’s appropriate. For anyone who has suffered a loss of this kind, the film should have some resonance. You’d have to be a complete sociopath not to feel anything here, especially when photos of D. Mitry’s real-life daughter scroll through the end credits.
But is that enough to lure a person to see a movie? Fans of faith-based cinema should appreciate the tidy resolutions, repentance tears, and talk of angels, even if neither God nor Jesus are never actually name-checked. And Pablo Diez’s cinematography elevates this movie significantly above what I suspect the budget level to be. In his able hands, downtown LA at night or a run-down former greenhouse can look equally as magical and ethereal as a green park.
Diez’s images ably tell the story, but we still hear constant voice-over from Angie, often reiterating the same points. For the real-life director, the repetition of reassurance is no doubt important emotionally. For viewers who’ve already gotten the point, however, it’s redundant. Kennedy is charming in scenes where she interacts with people, but not necessarily the deftest of narrators.
Much better, in an unexpected turn, is former child actor Corin Nemec, who appears to have pleasantly aged into ’80s Corbin Bernsen. (What’s in a name, eh?) He holds several plot strands together as the cop investigating the crash…whose daughter was also involved in it.
One of the fundamental reasons many people turn to religion is the concept that life on Earth is not all there is, and death is not the end. But what if traditional notions of Heaven and Hell are unacceptable? If a person would rather imagine their daughter flitting about this world rectifying everyone’s dysfunctional relationships, well, it’s arguably a more reassuring thought than her playing a harp on a cloud, or whatever else tradition says. So D. Mitry’s impulse in creating this story is totally understandable, and I hope it helps him heal.
I’m just not sure I need to be a witness to the process. Or that you’ll want to pay for the privilege.
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