★★½
“Start your engines…”
This one is fairly fringey, in terms of qualifications for the site. But I do feel, any film where a woman picks up and wields a chainsaw with bad intentions… Yeah, that’s pretty much a golden ticket to inclusion. You will have to be quite patient though. Very patient. It begins with a car crash which leaves Magda (De Mol), very much the worse for wear and badly concussed, in a gully off the road. She is rescued by Guy (Breck), an elderly gentleman who lives nearby, and who insists on nursing Magda back to health. However, matters are complicated by some rather dubious people, including Justin (Mills), who are after Magda and/or something in her possession.
For a large part, this is really more of a relationship drama between Magda and Guy, with the only tension coming from cut-aways to Justin’s attempts at locating her. There’s a gulf in age, life experiences and attitudes between Magda, a Polish immigrant with a bleak past, as well as a murky present, and Guy, a former soldier who now has Alzheimer’s and is struggling against his son’s attempts to put him in a care home. But, probably inevitably, the two begin to discover a mutual understanding and respect. Hands up, anyone who did not see that coming, and pay more attention next time. Though matters there aren’t helped by her being economical with the truth, in part due to convenient cinematic amnesia, until Justin arrives with a truth delivery.
De Mol does not appear to be Polish, and to be honest, this is often rather too apparent. Her line readings are stilted – admittedly, probably deliberately so – but if there’s any point to Magda’s ethnic origins, it’s outweighed by the clunkiness of the resulting performance. I was also significantly distracted by the logistics of a man with Alzheimer’s, who must be in his nineties (given his stories of flying a Lancaster bomber in World War 2), pulling a full-grown, unconscious woman from her car, out of a gorge, and back to his house – all by himself. My father is in his nineties, and I guarantee you, that ain’t happening. Later, Guy falls over, and can’t even get up by himself, so…
Things definitely kick up a gear when Justin arrives, and we find out a great deal more about the realities of events. We’re over eighty minutes in before that happens, and I do reckon it should have taken place considerably sooner, as there’s only so much passive-aggressive chit-chat I can stand between Ray and Magda. There is one strangely affecting scene right before the end where Magda finally opens up completely and, while it certainly leaves me looking more kindly on the film, I wish this had also happened much quicker. [Its poignancy is enhanced by knowing that Breck passed away in 2022; this was shot back in 2020] While the journey is clearly intended as the thing here, I’d have welcomed a straighter line to the eventual, chainsaw-ish destination.
Dir: Phil Peel
Star: Melissa De Mol, Alan Breck, Alastair Thomson Mills