TIFF Report: My Summer of Love, Spider Forest, Dead Birds Reviews.

Today was pretty much the half way point of the festival for me - the day my viewings broke into the double digits and also the day before I take a solid day off from screenings for a bit of a breather and to inject some normalcy back into my life. I was feeling pretty smug about my choices thus far having not seen anything that I'd consider a bad film yet but that string of good luck came to a screeching halt. I started well with Pawel Pawlikowski's stellar My Summer of Love - which has just been picked up by Focus Features which is a good move on both sides. I then descended into more middling territory with Spider Forest before descending into "I'd like my life back" territory with the horrible Dead Birds.

My Summer of Love is a fantastic character piece that crams three wildly different characters together and then simply observes what happens. Natalie Press stars as Mona, a lower class English girl who live with her brother above what used to be their family run pub. I say 'used to be' because brother Phil (Paddy Considine) found Jesus while in prison and has decided to shut off the taps and convert the place into a house of prayer. Through a chance encounter in the countryside Mona becomes close friends with Tamsin (Emily Blunt), a wealthy girl who has just been sent home from boarding school for being a negative influence. Despite their wildly different backgrounds Mona and Tamsin latch onto each other immediately becoming friends, confidantes, surrogate family and, finally, lovers in an increasingly obsessive relationship. While Mona is rapidly alienated by Phil's new-found religion, Tamsin finds it a curiosity - commenting at one point that "It must be interesting to believe in something." - and eventually, a challenge.

So what makes this work? First and foremost it's the performances. All three leads are simply stellar in their roles and the interactions ring absolutely true. The relationships are rich and complex and become only moreso as the film goes on. The treatment of the religious aspect of the film is to be applauded with Pawlikowski absolutely nailing the feel of these meetings - they never say so directly but it has all the markings of the Vineyard - and treating them with respect, but also perfectly capturing just how strange and alienating Phil's conversion appears from the outside looking in. The lesbian aspect of the film is also given a deft touch which is thanks no doubt to the director and his young leads in equal measure. The cinematography is luminous, the soundtrack is superb, on the whole just an excellent film all around.

In terms of plot and theme My Summer of Love shares more than a few common points with Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures so I took advantage of the Q&A to ask if Pawlikowski was aware of that film during production and if you're wondering the answer was no, though someone showed it to him somewhere along the way and he didn't really like it, feeling that it was more of a genre film while he was more interested in character which is a pretty accurate assessment.

Following My Summer of Love I hit one of those common dilemmas of the film festival - a gap of time between films significant enough to be tedious but not so long that it made going home worthwhile. Since I needed to hit the rush line for tickets to Spider Forest anyway I figured I may as well spend my dead time guarding a spot in line so up to the ROM I went.

I have some mixed feelings about this film. It's well written, well executed and well shot but I just couldn't shake it out of my head that I'd seen several other films out of Korea recently doing everything that Spider Forest does and, very often, doing it better. Taken purely on its own terms Spider Forest is a solid little film but taken in context of the Korean film community as a whole it's a middling effort is a genre that the Koreans do exceptionally well and I just couldn't figure out why they wouldn't have brought a film like A Tale Of Two Sisters or The Uninvited to the festival instead of this one.

Spider Forest is a story about memory, loss, grief, and the desire to be remembered after death. It tells the story of Min, a young widower who wakes up in the middle of a forest and stumbles into a house where he discovers the corpse of a man brutally hacked to death with a sickle and also his current girlfriend, who bleeds to death in his arms from similar stab wounds. Min hears a noise, chases a faceless man out of the house and, during the pursuit, is struck by a speeding car and suffers severe head damage. When he wakes in the hospital weeks later having lapsed into a coma following surgery, he begins the long and arduous process of reassembling his shattered memories of that evening.

My basic response to this is the same as my response to The Machinist. It executes all of its individual elements well but the film as a whole somehow ends up being slightly less than the sum of its parts. It's worth a viewing, yes, but not really worth standing in line just under two hours to land a ticket for, which I did.

And now Dead Birds. Oh, Dead Birds. Bad film. Very bad film. And, just to be clear, I don't mean that in the so-bad-it's-good sense of 'bad film', I mean it in the so-bad-you-should-under-no-circumstances-pay-money-to-see-it sense of 'bad film'.

Where does it go wrong? The blame should rest primarily on the script. This is horrible writing. Characters are flat and reach the second dimension only in their better moments, ideas are half baked at best, plot points are adopted and abandoned at will, and the dialogue is inane beyond words. In its better moments the script reaches first draft quality but those moments don't last long. I can only assume that this got the green light based on a story pitch rather than a script reading, because no studio exec in their right mind would pay to have this stuff made. The rest of the blame falls on whoever made the casting decisions. I'm sure they felt that they had a cast of fine young actors here - and in many cases they are correct based on the actor's past work - but, with the exception of Isaiah Washington, who is the only one who seems to have a clue how he should be behaving and is also the only one to successfully rise above the horrible text being put into his mouth, they are just simply wrong for a period piece. They just don't look or sound natural with the material at all.

Let's be honest here. Dead Birds is basically a slasher film of the 'young people trapped in small space with vicious psychopath' variety which means that it will be forgiven all manner of wrongs if it can only adhere to one simple rule: All deaths must occur on screen and escalate in graphic nature and blood spilt. Everybody knows this. Slasher fans will put up with absolutely anything as long as you keep the blood flowing. But they don't even get this right. Characters die off screen, they come back for no apparent reason and to no particular effect, and I still don't have a clue what actually happened to two of the main characters despite their death moments coming front and center on screen. Did Isaiah Washington just burst into a cloud of smoke? It sure looked that way, but I couldn't tell you how or why or why much of anybody should be expected to find this impressive.

To be fair I should point out that director Alex Turner does have some impressive visual techniques at his command, that the cinematography was excellent and that the creature effects were absolutely spectacular. Too bad they wasted it all. Avoid. Avoid, avoid, avoid.