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Reviews
M/M (2018)
Silence is a virtue
Out of town gay goes to Berlin, weirdness ensues, the end. Canadian heads to Europe in search of something. A stranger moves in, intent on stealing your life. None are a fresh premise and this leaves M/M open to accusations of being passé.
Conversely, M/M does succeed by showing some personal aspects of being an expat. Also, the concept of an evil Canadian is just so out there.....
M/M is an almost silent movie. It relies on very good visuals and ambient sound to convey the point. In fact M/M can have no more than one page of dialog. That is about 99 less than a normal feature film. From a movie making perspective it's an interesting experiment that works well. For mainstream audiences, I'm less sure.
Canadian Matthew is Berlin's latest bourgeois expat off the boat. Expat arrivals in Berlin need to pick their tribe. To join a tribe one must fit in and 'ape' the others.
Matthew encounters the stunning Mathias and becomes obsessed. Mathias' image is everything Matthew aspires for. Matthew moulds into him, befriending his friends and joining his tribe. When you 'ape' someone, you challenge their territory. You become a better version of them than they are. When Mathias has an accident, Matthew moves into his sublet and deposes the hapless victim from his own life.
Expat urban isolation means he can do this and no one notices. Mathias lies in a coma with only his nurse to care for him. No family or friends visit. Despite his perfect image, Mathias turns out to be another lonely expat, searching for his place to belong.
M/M's second half borders on being weird for the sake being weird. Now out of his coma Mathias returns to find Matthew living his life. His reaction is perhaps surprising. Maybe Mathias has a touch of Stockholm Syndrome? Maybe Mathias wants a meaningful friendship? Maybe the it is weird for the sake of being weird?
If you like conceptual art house films, you'll love M/M. Otherwise, probably not.
Reaching Distance (2018)
A bus ride through the mind.
Reaching Distance's history feels like a 1990's edition of Changing Rooms. "Can you take a scrapyard bus and with a few thousand dollars make a movie?".
In his feature-length debut, David Fairhurst has proven you can. More so, this is not a low budget indie that creeks and crackles. The lighting is good, sound crisp, staging excellent, acting solid and soundtrack impressive. Fairhurst's script, which uses few locations and a small core cast, is key to that. Altogether a smart and well-executed approach.
It must be said this route puts a lot of pressure on actor Wade Briggs as Logan. Reaching Distance is dialogue heavy. Briggs is in every scene and has significant dialogue in near-enough all of the movie's 93 minutes. Perhaps with such limited locations and transition between scenes that was inevitable. That's no small task and one which could have derailed proceedings. Thankfully Briggs rises to the challenge.
Reaching Distance is Logan's story, his grief, regret, denial and forgiveness. It explores the physical and psychological impacts of the car crash which killed his twin sister.
If one has to be critical, like a cross city bus ride, the plot is slow at times. It's also not always clear where the movie is going. When it gets there, the movie's genuine cleverness becomes apparent. You have to wait a little too long for that to become clear though. For video on demand, where it's easy to click the back button, an express route is needed. I'm just not convinced everyone's attention will hold that long.
Frustrating as I found that wait, Reaching Distance is ultimately worth it. Once over the initial delay, engaging twists arrive regularly and keep one surprised throughout. Congratulations to those involved, who have set a bar for indie quality. Despite some problems, it is a good psychological drama.