It would be great to say that this lo-fi movie from Mississippi film-maker Jaclyn Bethany, set in a single location at a small-town New Year’s Eve party, was an indie find. Sadly it’s like a flabbily conceived and impossibly indulgent student film, and the meta-level of reality disclosed at the end is supercilious; it adds nothing to this unfunny and laborious piece of work with its muddy lighting, flat sound design and torpid, almost indistinguishable performances. However, the appearance of child actor Ivy George, playing a little girl who’s been sent by her family to complain about the party’s noise (and concealing a hidden motive) does pep things up a little.
The drama takes place in the Californian town of Cambria on Highway One between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Maria (Aisha Fabienne Ross) is one of many young people at this party vocal-frying their lines to each other. She is disturbed (though the acting here doesn’t give much of a clue) to hear that someone called Nina (Juliette Labelle) is going to show up; this was the woman who left the neighbourhood 10 years before to follow her dream of acting in New York: Maria once had feelings for Nina. What will happen when they see each other again?
The answer, bafflingly, is … not a whole heck of a lot. There seems to be no great emotional charge to their reunion, which was promising so much, and the drama does not concentrate all that clearly on it in any case, constantly straying away to all the other silly, unfunny little subplots: a guy with a mysterious Russian accent, an ethereal young woman dating her professor, a flippant and haughty Brit whingeing about being dumped. There is a strong sense of: so what?
• Highway One is released on 5 November on cinemas, and on 8 November on digital platforms.
