Director: Dictynna Hood
Stars: Claire Foy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Shaun Evans, Peter McDonald, Sinead Matthews
Dawn (Foy) and David (Cumberbatch) have moved back to David’s childhood village in the hope of starting a new life. However, soon after arriving they’re paid a surprise visit by Nick (Evans), David’s brother, who has just come home from the war. They take him in but soon realize that he’s suffering from PTSD, but that a lot of his troubles are rooted in his and David’s childhood. As a result of this Dawn is shown a side to her husband that she has not seen before, and it casts her marriage in a whole new light.
Wreckers is a film that feels like it wants to be high on human drama but then forgets to follow through with it. There’s adultery, jealousy, lust, greed, secrets, deceit, all the ingredients to weave a tangled web of lies between the small group of characters and yet it all ends up feeling rather empty and hollow. The main problem, I feel, is that it tries to be too ambiguous with its subject matter. A lot of the motivations and feelings of the characters aren’t defined clearly and by the end I didn’t have a real insight into what was happening. I felt the actors did an okay job at conveying certain emotions but not enough was stated explicitly.
The arrival of Nick causes a lot of secrets to come from the past, and this is interesting as I like a bit of mystery and there are some dark secrets. But they always seem to be lurking in the background and when they are uncovered they barely register with the characters, and are only mentioned briefly before the film moves on to the next problem, and the next secret. As a result they pile up without being resolved.
The central theme of the movie seems to be that we should gloss over the bad parts of life for the sake of fully enjoying the good, but I’m not sure this is a suitable philosophy to promote. But again, that’s just my interpretation of the nebulous theme, it could well be that there is no theme and the director simply wanted to show a dark side of human nature.
To illustrate my concerns I’ll give you an example. At one point there’s a sex scene between two of the characters and initially it seems like rape. He comes into her house uninvited and creeps up the stairs while she waits, frozen and wide eyed. Yet later on she doesn’t flinch when she sees him and in fact greets him cheerily, and this confused me a great deal because at no point was I sure of how I was supposed to feel about anything that was going on. I suppose it could be a commentary on the complexity of human interactions but I feel like I have to struggle to piece together a meaning of the film, and the one question I’m left with is, ‘is it worth it?’.
No, it’s not. I don’t want to have to put this much thought into figuring out a film when the film doesn’t give me much to work with. It’s all well and good introducing secrets and problems, but I want to know why they happened. I want to know what the characters feel. In Wreckers the characters seem distant and it feels like the viewer has to do the majority of the work to find enjoyment in it, so I can’t recommend it.
