Kieran Darcy-Smith‘s Wish You Were Here (Hopscotch, 4.28.12) is about the fallout from a tragic Cambodian vacation that married, expecting parents Dave and Alice (Joel Edgerton, Felicity Price) have recently shared with Alice’s younger sister (Teresa Palmer) and her new boyfriend, Jeremy (Antony Star).
Jeremy vanished at the end of the getaway and nobody seems to know (or be able to admit) what happened, although it’s obvious that Dave knows and will eventually spill the beans by Act Three.
But the film is mainly about the reaction of Alice to a brief instance of infidelity that also happened in Cambodia. The kind of infidelity that happened so quickly with both parties so drunk or stoned that they don’t remember much.
And the minute Alice learns of this you’re muttering “oh, Christ, here we go.” Her anger gradually becomes a drag to be around.
Not that it’s wrong or unnatural for her to be outraged, but it becomes tedious — the same piano chord played over and over. If you remember Jeanne Tripplehorn‘s prolonged Defcon-1 reaction to Tom Cruise‘s infidelity in The Firm, you have a general idea what happens here.
After a while I started muttering to myself “get over it, for God’s sake…they were drunk and are both really sorry…Jesus.”
Indiewire‘s Kevin Jagernauth describes Kieran Darcy-Smith‘s Wish You Were Here (Entertainment One, 6.7) as a suspense drama about a good-looking guy (Antony Star) who goes missing on a Cambodian vacation.
Don’t you believe it. It’s mainly about a horse-faced pregnant wife (Felicity Price) who has a shit fit when she discovers her husband (Joel Edgerton) recently had drunken sex with her much hotter younger sister (Teresa Palmer). The missing guy aspect is strictly a subplot.
It’s basically a “get away from me, you fucked my sister!” movie with a side-plot about what happened in Cambodia. It’s about the cost of suppressing the truth and not coming clean, and the cost of coming clean about meaningless infidelity.
This is a fairly decent film as far as it goes (nicely composed, well acted, a fascinating montage of Cambodia), but I would have written a different story. Sorry.
Update: Strange as this may sound, I’m flirting with re-watching this. It’s streaming on Amazon.