Written and directed by Chris Bavota and Lee Paula Springer, this is the tale of a brother and sister. Jillian Harris is Becca, a woman about to embark on the next stage of her life. She has a good opportunity, and wants to make the most of it. But that means first visiting her brother, Richie (Heston Horwin), and figuring out how to break the news to him. Things take a turn when she gets to his home and finds his corpse. They take another turn when Richie appears in a form that is very much alive and well. Something strange has happened after he committed suicide. Obviously. Not expecting to come back, Richie now wants Becca to help him figure out just what is going on.
Working well within the limitations they have, Bavota and Springer help themselves immensely with the strength of their central idea. Someone dying and then coming back to life, yet still seeing their corpse in the space where it has been left, is an inherently unsettling idea. And there’s also a new wall cavity that looks suspiciously like a birth . . . gateway. The cast is, for the most part, just made up of three people (as well as those already mentioned, Matt Keyes plays an irritated neighbour), and there's an investigation into the central mystery without anyone ever getting your hopes up that it will be solved. I won't say whether it is or not.
Harris and Horwin work very well together, both creating a believable chemistry of love and tension between siblings. Horwin is stuck with the more difficult character, in a way, as he is the brother who has made a lot of mistakes that his sister has helped him try to bounce back from, but he's helped by a script that makes him just the right amount of annoying, without ever going overboard. It helps that we first meet him with the knowledge that he died, and Harris is the one often left to react to what is going on with ever-increasing fear and panic. Keyes does well in a rather thankless role, becoming one more obstacle on the road to the leads experimenting as they try to get to the bottom of things.
The biggest plus point here has to be the fact that it essentially all stems from a suicide though. Not a suicide attempt. A suicide. Once the initial shock of the strangeness she is seeing fades, Becca has to try and process the fact that her brother took his own life. She wants to know his reasons, wants to know how she could be more helpful. It's all stated in a very matter-of-fact way by Richie, but the conversations that have to explore this part of the plot end up reverberating through the rest of the movie, all the way through to a very satisfying finale.
The title may lead you to believe that this is a very different kind of film, but give this a go and you may end up being very pleasantly surprised. It doesn't take long to get to the sci-fi weirdness at the heart of it, and it's a winning combination of thought-provoking moments, macabre humour, and one or two dark turns.
8/10
https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews
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