Prime Time: Where Do We Go From Here? (2015)

The feature debut from writer-director John McPhail, after a few years working on a variety of well-received shorts, Where Do We Go From Here? is a perfectly fine distraction, but to try and give it too much praise, simply because I really like McPhail (both for his work on Anna And The Apocalypse and for his personality and sense of humour), would be doing both of us a disservice. This is good. It's not great. And I suspect that some will hate it.

After an extended opening montage sequence showing the life of our main character, James (Tyler Collins), the main plot begins to unfold. James works at a care home for the elderly. It's managed by the uncaring Miss Thompson (Maryam Hamidi) and the residents don't get to live their lives as fully as they might want to. James finds his days brightened up when a new nurse, Jen (Lucy-Jane Quinlan), starts to work in the home. He takes an immediate shine to her. And Jen could be an essential presence when James helps to plan a non-sanctioned trip with residents Joan (Alison Peebles), Malcolm (Richard Addison), and Nancy (Deirdre Murray).

I was impressed by the first ten minutes of Where Do We Go From Here? It's a sequence that shows us the ups and downs of a life almost as effectively as Up (which is a high water mark for such things). Once that was out of the way, the film settled down into what it really was, which is a sweet little comedy drama hoping to make viewers smile as it stitches together various character moments with an overstuffed soundtrack (featuring a number of songs written and performed by Collins).

If you have ever watched a soap opera and enjoyed a certain plot strand that has provided some light relief to the more serious moments then you may get a familiar feeling from watching this. That's what it feels like, the comedic strand of a soap opera run with the other stuff edited out. I know that isn't exactly high praise, but I don't mean it to be damning either.

McPhail does great work in putting everything together, and that's a remarkable achievement in itself (considering the low budget that I assume he was working with). Everything looks and sounds crisp and clean. It's a shame that the script takes no risks, and is missing a better balance of the comedic and the effective (a scene in which Nancy reminisces about her husband leads on to a sad scene in which she doesn't recognise his name when it is mentioned to her).

The cast don't do a bad job. Collins is, for the most part, a convincing Scottish lead (only infrequently slipping with the accent) and he's easy to like in the role of the awkward and sweet James. Quinlan is perhaps a bit more believable as Jen, working in a job that she doesn't love, although there's never enough work done to show her coming around to liking James. Hamidi is an amusingly over the top villain, and Peebles, Addison, and Murray are all wonderful as the elderly residents with plenty of life and fight left in them yet, despite what some others may think.

I enjoyed this but I won't be rushing to rewatch it, or recommending it to many others. And I'm happy to see McPhail continuing to develop his talents in projects that seem to better suit his ambition.

5/10

Prime members can see the movie here.
Americans can see the movie here.