In an English coastal town, German slacker Melanie (Nora Tschirner) is spinning her wheels, neglected by her fiance, a never-seen voice on the phone.
In a cafe, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Ray (Rob Knighton), a mysterious, taciturn older man with cut-glass cheek bones who’s back in his hometown for more than just the death of his younger brother. The two pal up, play at shoplifting and pay a visit to Ray’s brother’s kooky Wiccan family, and before you can say Lost in Translation, stifled feelings of romantic yearning begin to stir between these two people at very different points in their lives.
Mono-named writer-director Jones was seemingly aiming for quirky, offbeat whimsy with a downbeat undertone but the result is more like clumsy, overthought twee with an undercooked script. Still, Tschirner and Knighton are both oddly watchable even though there’s not an atom of palpable onscreen chemistry between them.
