Shot in and around Manchester, favouring cobbled alleys and anonymously austere office buildings for locations, this contemporary reworking of Oedipus Rex is a well-meaning but plodding drama. Instead of a Greek king, the protagonist is Campbell, a handsome but brooding young man (Reece Douglas, quite good) who has become an executive in the vaguely defined family company owned by his partner Jaz (Miranda Benjamin), a woman 20 years older.
The two are looking into adopting a fertilised egg if they don’t succeed in getting Jaz pregnant. But her brother takes Campbell to meet a “seer” named Tim, who reveals that Jaz is in fact Campbell’s biological mother, rather spoiling the whole happy-family vibe. And on it goes, tracking pretty closely to the narrative as laid out in Greek mythology, but with modern dress and language stripped back to the most basic dialogue.
Unfortunately, writer-producer-director-composer-editor Erik Knudsen (who has made several of these low-budget productions, such as Sea of Madness) has something of a cloth ear for dialogue, and apparently not a lot more skill when working with the less experienced or talented actors.
For the most part, this is painfully amateurish stuff that doesn’t offer many new or original themes apart from the modish concept of embryo adoption. Nor is the fact that Campbell is mixed race developed much. Knudsen’s most irritating quirk as a film-maker is holding on empty space for extra beats at the end of nearly every shot, trying to create a portentousness that the film does not earn and dragging out the running time to a tedious 84 minutes. Nevertheless, there are flickers of beauty, most notably the instant of recognition when the two leads silently realise the full horror of their predicament, a genuinely electric moment thanks to Douglas and Benjamin’s performances.
