MPAA Rating: R
Director: Kieran Darcy-Smith
Film Pulse Score: 6.5/10
Kieran Darcy-Smith’s debut feature length, Wish You Were Here, is unusually standard and naturalistic in its execution. I say unusually standard because most filmmakers rely on dizzying camerawork and pulse-pounding action sequences, coupled with a script packed with preposterous plot-twists and various over-the-top revelations or developments, but not writer/director Darcy-Smith. Co-written with actress Felicity Price (who also stars), Wish You Were Here instead relies on plausible scenarios in which the characters deliver natural, emotionally convincing performances.
Darcy-Smith is one of the members of the Australian film collective known as Blue Tongue Films which features members Joel Edgerton, Nash Edgerton, Mirrah Foulkes, David Michôd, Spencer Susser and Luke Doolan. Wish You Were Here is their latest film after a slew of short films and a handful of features (Animal Kingdom, The Square and Hesher). If you happen to like the work coming from Blue Tongue Films (as I do) or would like an introduction, I suggest you visit their website where you can view all of their short films.
Wish You Were Here starts off with an upbeat montage of two couples – Dave and Alice (Joel Edgerton, Felicity Price) and Jeremy and Steph (Antony Starr, Teresa Palmer) – vacationing in and around a picturesque beach resort village in Cambodia. Everyone is enjoying themselves. Lounging on the beach, swimming in the ocean, perusing the marketplace, letting people place numerous tarantulas on your person…you know, an idyllic vacation in Southeast Asia. That is until, the idyllic vacation evaporates in front of them through the disappearance of Jeremy during a night of dancing, drinking and popping ecstasy.
Dave and Alice come back to Sydney, Australia to their two children and their respective employments. Life seems to go on like everything is behind them, mostly because it has to, parental and financial responsibilities will not wait until you find your acquaintance in Cambodia. So, Dave and Alice try their best to settle back into their daily routines and, for the most part, they are successful. Even though, one gets the sense that Dave is hiding something…he always seems ill-at-ease. When Steph returns the reasoning behind that ill-at-ease is quickly revealed through an emotionally realistic confession on the part of Dave.
Yet, something still seems to be bothering Dave. He starts to showcase a steadying array of paranoia symtopms which quickly evolve into crippling panic attacks. He gets upset – almost overreacting – when his wife, Alice goes to the police with details of Jeremy’s disappearance. The drugs, his business dealings in Southeast Asia and this is where Darcy-Smith excels with Wish You Were Here. The slow, meticulous unearthing of the various details and developments in-and-around the events of that fateful night. No fancy editing. No mind-melting plot-twists. No highly stylized action sequences showing the principal characters in immediate peril. Just natural occurrences portrayed with emotional authenticity rendering the developments not only plausible but emotionally affecting.
Darcy-Smith and Price’s script with it’s slow yet precise building united with the emotionally convincing performances makes Wish You Were Here a refreshing natural, believable mystery featuring a perfectly revelatory explanation, so realistically rendered that leaves Dave and the audience absolutely stunned and terrified. Wish You Were Here shows that one or two bad decisions, most of which are macho-posturing, from one individual has the ability to impact and effectively destroy numerous lives in one fell swoop.
