Scrawl (2015)

I only learned of the existence of Scrawl a few days ago, when the writer-director mentioned that it had appeared on Amazon Prime here in the UK without anyone letting him know. I admired his little bit of self-promotion, and the message was a nice and slightly self-effacing one. So I decided to give this a watch.

Unfortunately, Scrawl is almost completely dire for every minute of the just-under-80-minute runtime. I feel sorry for the people who check it out because Daisy Ridley is in it. She's just as bad as everyone else onscreen.

Let me tell you what it's all about anyway. Simon (Liam Hughes) is working on a comic with his friend, Joe (Joe Daly). Things start happening to people around him that are directly from the comic. And Daisy Ridley plays Hannah, a young woman who is basically a force of death. Characters have moments of looking seriously off into the distance as they contemplate a number of tedious flashbacks, the script lines up one bit of terrible dialogue after another, and everyone overacts until the end credits come along to mercifully end the experience.

I don't like to be outright rude when reviewing movies. A lot of people work on these things, and sometimes the end result just doesn't come close to what they had in mind when starting their journey. So I will try not to go overboard with the easy insults. The fact remains, however, that Scrawl is sometimes incomprehensible, lacking any polish in any department, and really not worth your time at all.

Peter Hearn, the man who wrote and directed this, is probably delighted that he was lucky enough to cast Ridley in her feature film debut. I am almost certain that Ridley herself won't be as delighted, and I doubt she even has this on her CV nowadays. Her performance here, although not good, is a point of minor interest to those who want a complete overview of her film career. Hearn provides nothing else that even comes close to making the film more bearable.

Hughes and Daly just aren't very good in their roles, sorry to say, and poor Annabelle Le Gresley is stuck with most of those moments when a flashback is occurring. Nathalie Pownall and Mark Forester Evans both fare slightly better, perhaps simply due to them being more experienced adults in the midst of such a relatively young cast, but they also can't overcome the inept script.

I don't think I can be any clearer here. The acting is poor, the cinematography is worse than an advert filmed by a local takeaway restaurant to appear on your regional TV, the score is weak, and the effects range from the amateurish to the so-bad-they-must-be-taking-the-piss. The last time I sat through something that was this bad it had the word "Amityville" shoehorned into the title.

1/10

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