By Morris Dean
Wish You Were Here (2012, directed by Kieran Darcy-Smith) grabbed my attention about as thoroughly as a well-made thriller can, for two particular reasons I can identify:
The Cambodia setting is both attractive and foreboding. I felt a great tension between the holiday spirit of the four young Australians on vacation and the obvious danger they are exposing themselves to in the teeming streets and bazaars without any apparent awareness of being "marked" by any number of less well-off Asians.
The character Dave Flannery seems to be preoccupied, and I wonder now whether Joel Edgerton weren't cast in the role in part because he naturally looks unhappy and burdened.
These two elements are even more important for creating tension than the proximate cause: the disappearance of one of their party—Jeremy King (Anthony Starr), to whom both Dave's wife Alice (Felicity Price) and her sister Steph (Teresa Palmer) seem to be attracted.
The movie's architecture of present action and flashback is carefully constructed to slowly reveal that Dave indeed is unhappy and burdened, and the sequence of scenes slowly reveal how his burden contributes to his actions both on vacation and thereafter at home in Sydney.
Why do the party take ecstasy pills? Why is Dave stumbling about in a field bare-chested and beat-up? Why is he out alone seeming to be trying to drink himself into a stupor—now in a seedy part of the city away even from the relative safety of crowds?
Why, later, won't he tell the authorities who are investigating Jeremy's disappearance anything about Jeremy's business—even though clamming up looks anything but forthcoming?
And I haven't even mentioned that Dave and Steph seemed to have done something together over there....
Extremely well crafted thriller. You'll want to know how much of this creation was accomplished early on a storyboard, and how much later during editing. As a local filmmaker was quoted as saying in a Burlington newspaper Thursday, about his first full-length film, “Until you do it you don’t realize how much is involved.”
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean
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