Elsewhere

“Have you ever had a secret that you couldn’t live with keeping. And you think about it so much that you became sure people were able to tell your secret just by looking at you.” This universal inner dialogue forms the beginning of this well acted but ultimately tepid mystery thriller. A young girl, Sarah (Anna Kendrick) finds out that her best friend, Jillian (Tania Raymonde) has been seeing men she meets online. But when Jillian disappears Sarah and a friend begin to unravel her whereabouts using her diary and a strange and ominous video cell phone message. The cast is far better than the tired material allows for but that's no reason to bother with this. It isn’t just that you can see the ending coming a million miles away it’s that Elsewhere gets everything else but the casting wrong as well. I grew up not far from Goshen Indiana and while no doubt it is, like any small town, a repository of many hidden and ugly secrets it is also far less of a charicature than this. Then again the characters here are even more charicatured. The DVD features an audio commentary with the director and producer, a making of featurette, deleted scenes and a photo gallery.