WISH YOU WERE HERE

Missing In Action

Directed by Kieran Darcy-Smith
Starring Joel Edgerton, Teresa Palmer, and Felicity Price

Wish You Were Here is a low-budget thriller in much the same vein as Picnic At Hanging Rock; people go missing on a trip and we, along with the characters, spend the rest of the film wondering what has happened and trying to pick up on any clues are on the way.

Wish You Were Here handles things in a much more 2012 way: instead of a group of schoolgirls going on a school excursion, the group comprises of four grown up Generation X-ers. Married couple Alice (Felicity Price) and Dave (Joel Edgerton), along with Alice’s sister Steph (Teresa Palmer) and her new boyfriend Jeremy (Antony Starr) travel to Cambodia on a holiday, and are devastated when Jeremy fails to return home with them. He’s become a missing person statistic, just another tourist who has mysteriously disappeared overseas.

While this situation sounds stressful enough - it’s particularly distressing to watch Steph have to come back alone from Cambodia after searches and enquiries have proved nothing - there are many other ugly secrets bubbling under the surface, which are brought up by Jeremy’s sudden disappearance.

The film isn’t told in chronological order, instead relying on a series of flashbacks to the night Jeremy went missing, and even all the way back to the time when Steph first tells Alice about her new boyfriend. While this does make the film a little hard to follow at times, it does create the sense that the audience is only piecing information together along with the characters, and keeps us on our toes until the end.

However, when you’ve built up the ending that much, you have to make it something that will satisfy viewers. With plenty of red herrings and unimportant plot points thrown in, the ending may be a little dissatisfying or anti-climatic to thriller movie buffs.

Although there’s only a small cast, they all excel in their roles. In particular, Price and Edgerton bring a darker, vaguely threatening air to their characters, a mother and father who are living an idyllic bohemian lifestyle with two kids and a third on the way. The raw devastation that Price portrays as Alice’s world spirals out of control is particularly compelling to watch.

The characters are all flawed. After all, it’s what makes them human, and keeping things real is integral to the plot in this film. But it also distances the audience from the characters. They’ve all been wronged, but in some cases it’s their own thoughtless actions that have brought their world spectacularly crashing down, and it’s hard to feel any sympathy for them.

Wish You Were Here is a strong offering from director Kieran Darcy-Smith. The efforts taken to ensure the ‘realism’ of the film are evident - the travel scenes were really filmed in Cambodia, there was no stylist or set stylist, so all the characters and their homes look appropriately lived in, and the production crew was kept to a minimum.

Though it’s generally a good watch, the climax is built up so relentlessly throughout the film that the ending of the story may leave viewers feeling slightly disappointed.

_TARA LLOYD