THE VOID - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Lovecraft/CronenbergStyleHorror meet Astron6Dudes

These dudes are not looking to burn crosses.

The Void (2017)
Dirs. Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanski
Starring: Aaron Poole, Kathleen Munroe, Kenneth Welsh

Review By Greg Klymkiw

God knows all artists seek to move forward. I'm the last person to have a problem with this. Sometimes though, with even the best intentions, the runner stumbles.

With The Void, the brilliant Astron-6 dudes Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski have served up something altogether distinct from their previous work (Manborg, Father's Day). The results are a mixed bag o' nuts. This would be fine if the bag was replete with pecans instead of way too many hazel nuts, Brazil nuts, almonds and (ugh) walnuts. Well, these things happen sometimes.

It all depends on the dexterity of the Bulk Barn scooping.

Blending H.P. Lovecraft Cthulu-like shenanigans with Cronenberg-inspired body horror and a few 80s Lucio Fulci smatterings, The Void spins a gory yarn involving a local-yokel lawman (Aaron Poole) and a variety of medical personnel, patients and safety-seeking rednecks in a remote rural hospital on the eve of it being shut down forever (shades of Assault on Precinct 13 here). On one deep, dark night, a whack of creepy hooded figures (vaguely resembling KKK types) have surrounded the joint whilst inside, a creepy old Doctor (Kenneth Welsh) is unleashing some extremely ungodly results of his twisted experiments.

Yup, there are hooded psychos outside and monsters inside. And babes.

Sounds good to me.

The only problem, however, is that too much of the movie unfurls with humourless portent and though there are a few dollops of genuine suspense mixed with a cornucopia of grotesque practical creature F/X and more than a few rivers and splatters of glorious crimson, things settle into a been-there-done-that rhythm and this is certainly not the kind of by-rote playbook one expects from Messrs Gillespie and Kostanski. These guys have been responsible for some of the most original genre films of the past decade, but The Void offers too much treading on familiar turf.

That one of the patients in the hospital is a pregnant woman set to pop and that the lawman and his estranged wife (who is a nurse at the hospital) have a backstory involving a pregnancy gone wrong is kind of sickening. And it's not good sickening, but the "Oh God, not this again" kind of sickening.

One of the more annoying aspects of this Canadian film is that it goes out of its way to set itself in America (replete with stars and stripes flying on the flag outdoors and sheriff/State Trooper types), even though the movie's been shot in Northern Ontario and has received Canadian taxpayer dollars to partially finance it. There's absolutely no artistic grounds for this decision. It's not like the film explores any real political/social/cultural context and frankly, Northern Ontario is chockfull of its own brand of weirdness. Also, given the dire contemporary political situation in Canada (and rural Ontario in particular) with substandard public health, these are elements that could have cleverly fleshed out the familiar machinations of the plot and characters. These guys have already made movies set in plenty of magical never-never-lands. Here they're in a relatively naturalistic setting and no attempt is made to exploit the indigenous qualities of where the movie has actually been made.

There's also something a bit weird about the look of the movie. Maybe it was the DCP press-screened in advance of its theatrical release, but so much of the film was nicely shot with solid compositions and a fine lighting/colour palette, that when the action shifts to the dank, dark corners of the hospital, everything feels murky - not in a good way, either. It felt like there was something off with either the colour timing or the lighting. Given that The Void was shot by one of the country's best cinematographers this really made no sense. If anything, these sequences were begging for a controlled murkiness - deep rich blacks might have been ideal. It's a real head-scratcher, especially considering the visual aplomb of Gillespie/Kostanski's previous work.

Still, it's a horror movie. Are there scares? Yeah, a few. But given the pedigree of the filmmakers and a first-rate cast of terrific Canuck thespians, The Void feels curiously lacking. I could make a joke using the film's title, but I'll bite my tongue on that one.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **½ Two-and-a-Half Stars

The Void plays in limited theatrical release via dFilms at the Royal Cinema in Toronto and will be available on iTunes on April 7, 2017.

SLEEPING GIANT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - One of 2015's best films opens theatrically across Canada via D Films. If you dare miss this film on a big screen, I hereby utter the immortal words of Liam Neeson: "I will find you and I will kill you!"

Preamble to Review: For years I've been blowing chunks in the direction of Canada's Cineplex Entertainment for their continued non-support of Canadian Cinema and indie cinema in general. When I say Canadian Cinema, I am not referring to grotesqueries like Hyena Road and Passchendaele, nor am I referring to fake-Canadian international co-productions that are not Canadian in any way shape or form (yet are supported with funds from the Canadian government and even championed by them as Canadian).

No, what I mean are bonafide, culturally significant Canadian films like Sleeping Giant. Cineplex Entertainment has bestowed an opening weekend upon the film in its flagship Toronto cinema, the Varsity. Personally, I believe it would have been a supreme embarrassment for Cineplex if they'd NOT played the film. That said, the exhibition of Canadian cinema is not solely incumbent upon major exhibitors, but requires commitment and ingenuity from Canadian distributors. Luckily, Sleeping Giant is being handled by D Films in Toronto and they have stepped up to the plate marvellously with first-rate publicity, magnificent marketing and an excellent theatrical opinion-maker preview prior to the opening day. Exhibition and Distribution go hand-in-hand, BUT exhibition of Canadian Cinema at the level of major chains like Cineplex seems to only garner their support and commitment when they feel like it (Flopperoo Hyena Road, anyone?). Why, oh why, oh why, are there not Sleeping Giant one-sheets (which are excellent) up in every Cineplex cinema across the country and why, oh why, oh why have there not been Sleeping Giant trailers (also excellent) playing on way more Cineplex screens coast-to-coast? The P.R. commitment Cineplex made to flopperoo Hyena Road was ridiculously substantial. I have seen nothing on a similar scale for Sleeping Giant. For those living in Toronto, see Sleeping Giant this weekend. This is a movie that deserves to hold on at the Cineplex Entertainment flagship for many weeks.

Sleeping Giant (2015)
Dir. Andrew Cividino

Scr. Cividino, Aaron Yeger, Blain Watters
Starring: Jackson Martin, Nick Serino, Reece Moffett,
Katelyn McKerracher, David Disher, Erika Brodzky, Rita Serino

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Most teenage boys have experienced dull days in cottage country - so dull, so sleepy, so quiet, that often, extreme measures need to be implemented. Sleeping Giant is a skilfully directed, gorgeously written and nicely observed slice of life that most of us from the male persuasion - young, old and those who never quite grew up - will be deeply affected by. It also has a terrifically unique Canadian flavour in that it eschews the usual sentimental sweetness of most coming of age films like the sickening tweeness of The Kings of Summer and the nostalgic goo of Stand By Me.

There's plenty of tough North Western Ontario hoser-speak and the kind of swagger that can, more often than not, lead to danger. (My own Canuck adolescence was so pathetic, we'd think nothing of driving eight hours from Winnipeg to Thunder Bay, where Sleeping Giant was shot, to hang in the heavy metal watering hole The Inn-Towner to simply ogle all the amply-bottomed-and-bosomed hoser chicks with big hair that seemed to glow like radiation in the fluorescence of this dank monument to Canuckian redneck-ism.)

The three young lads at the centre of the film don't even get to hang at the Inn-Towner. They're stuck in a cottage community overlooking Lake Superior where the massive Sleeping Giant (so named by the area's indigenous peoples because the humungous outcropping of turf in the lake looks just like some Brobdingnagian creature keeled over on its back) consumes all views upon the water. The Sleeping Giant is also the name of an insanely dangerous hunk of rock exploding upwards as a beacon for all strapping young men to idiotically dive from the top of it.

Director Cividino has a great feel for the lives of these young men: their wrasslin' bouts, hanging around, stealing beer from the local vendor, zipping around in a golf cart, tear-assing along the rural asphalt on skateboards, watching pathetic fireworks and hitting the noisy arcade. The central figure of the trio is a bit of a dull, pampered rich boy from the city with a Dad so liberal he preaches the healthy sowing of wild oats (while secretly boffing the babe-o-licious hoser chick checkout girl behind his wife's back).

The other two boys are your garden variety country cousin trailer park dwellers living with their raspy-voiced, plain-spoken, chain-smoking Grannie. One of the two white trash laddies is a handsome, young rake who looks to the rich boy's Daddy with a mixture of envy and yearning for a father figure in his life, whilst the other is a deliriously foul-mouthed, mean-spirited misogynist full of bilious utterances about sex.

Most interesting of all is the fact that our rich boy hero takes on so many of the properties one can ascribe to an almost historical stylistic trademark in Canadian cinema. He's the semi-mute observer. He takes it all in passively and the notion of overt action is a rare thing for him to choose. Pretty much every film from the late 80s to mid-90s Golden Age of English-Canadian film, most notably in work by Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin and John Paizs, is happily populated with leading men of this variety. The difference here though, is that Cividino's style, unlike the near-expressionist qualities of the aforementioned, is rooted in the kind of neo-realist perspective one would more often experience in early Donald Shebib works.

There's also a point when some of us might be thinking, "Hey, as great as this is, are we really going to be staring at nothing but guys? Hell, they're all nice looking young bucks with distinctive qualities, but where, oh where, are the babes?"

Well, Cividino does not disappoint. When a hot young teenage babe enters the picture, loyalties become strained, if not divided.

And, getting back to one of my favourite topics, our burgeoning young fellas experience even more division and tantalizing temptation when the film's smouldering homoerotic qualities wend in and out through the picture. Sadly, said homoeroticism is never requited to the degree one of the characters (and some audience members, including moi) would have hoped for, but there's plenty of smouldering in the movie to keep our eyes glued to the screen.

There is, you see, that dangerous sleeping giant cliff. It's a rite of passage that's claimed more than a few lives over the years and the film is charged with a slowly mounting and creepy sense of malevolence tied both to the land and the burgeoning machismo of our three young heroes.

Something bad is going to happen. You can't help but feel it and it's the very thing which adds to the ample qualities of the picture's compulsive form and spirit.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4 Stars

Sleeping Giant opens in Canada on the following dates:
April 8th - Toronto
April 15th - Vancouver, Montreal
April 22nd - expansion to rest of country

THE GUEST - Review By Greg Klymkiw - New Wingard Thriller opens theatrically in Toronto

Good thrillers ALWAYS have
BABES & HUNKS
(in addition to being, uh, good).

The Guest (2014)
Dir. Adam Wingard
Starring: Dan Stevens, Maika Monroe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This creepy, edge-of-you-seat thriller is a cool contemporary take on Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. It ain't Hitchcock (what is?) and The Master would never let scribe Simon Barrett get away with the disappointing, too-predictable "shocker" reveal that slides its way into the proceedings, but director Wingard more-than-ably puts his terrific thespians through decent blood-soaked gymnastics.

David (Dan Stevens) is an old army pal of a young fella who bravely died in Afghanistan. When he returns after his tour of duty in, David pays a surprise visit to the lad's grieving family to convey his sympathy, but also to relay verbal messages croaked out during his friend's death rattles. The family is so charmed by the handsome, but kind of "off" David, that he's invited into their home to stay.

Caleb's little sister, the babe-o-licious Anna (Maika Monroe, also leading the casting charge in It Follows) is certainly enamoured with David's buff, hunky good looks, but as the film progresses, she's able to see there's something not all together right with The Guest. Danger looms, as does the bloodletting.

When it's revealed that David might not entirely be telling the truth, she keeps her eye on him and eventually realizes her family might be at risk of being iced. This is not only a good deal for thriller fans, but it's a nice contemporary spin on Hitch's classic by utilizing the whole backdrop of psychos-in-the-army, post-traumatic stress disorder and, of course, America's ridiculous waste of human life in their moronic "war on terror".

Wingard's direction here is more taut and assured than You're Next, his previous outing and even when the plot veers into please-don't-go-there territory (a similar problem that afflicted the aforementioned 2011 thriller), it's still a sheer delight to see how well he manages the carnage, action and suspense. No need to be a total grumpy-pants about the disenchantment with the turns eventually taken by the plot, as The Guest is a corker of a thriller that'll more than satisfy one's need to accidentally expunge waste matter in one's panties.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

The Guest is a Dfilms release opening theatrically in Toronto with, hopefully, a wider release to follow.

MY OLD LADY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Israel Horovitz adapts own play for feature directing debut at age 75

Maggie Smith. Kevin Kline. Head of boar.
What could possibly go wrong?

My Old Lady (2014)
Dir. Israel Horovitz
Starring: Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott-Thomas

Review By Greg Klymkiw

That 75-year-old writer Israel Horovitz has remain tethered to the theatrical roots of adapting his play to the big screen is not the main problem plaguing his belated feature-length directorial debut. The source material and, by extension, his screenplay for My Old Lady, is afflicted with a kind of narrative schizophrenia.

It's not, however, without some merit.

When we first meet Mathias Gold (Kevin Kline), he's penniless. Happily, his rudderless life in New York is behind him as he's depleted what little dough he had to fly across the pond and secure the Parisian home willed to him by his estranged and recently deceased father. Real estate values in Gay-Paree being sky's the limit, especially the choice property he's come into, Mathias feels like he's finally hit the freedom-58 jackpot.

His series of failed marriages, unpublished novels and flopper-roo suicide attempt seem like so many dust bunnies sucked up into a vacuum cleaner. Before hitting the big 6-0, maybe, just maybe, he's going to do some real living.

This, however, proves easier said than done. He is, after all, in France. It seems dear, departed daddy purchased the property under the perverse real estate laws of le beau pays de la romance and he's stuck with the original owner, the 92-year-old Mathilde (Maggie Smith), until she dies. Now, at this ripe age, you'd think it wouldn't be a problem, but the terms of such a purchase, known as a viager, stipulates that the rightful property owner must pay the original owner a generous monthly stipend. If these payments ever go into default, the buyer loses the property to the original owner.

Mathias has no money. None. Zip. Nada. He also has no home. Until he can figure out how to make the monthly payments, he's also forced into renting a room from the old lady. They do snipe ever-so amusingly and eruditely at one another. Never fear, though, Horovitz doesn't take us into some kind of sickening Harold and Maude wannabe territory. Mathilde, you see, has an unmarried, middle-aged, but super-hot daughter Chloé (Kristin Scott Thomas). She hates Mathias's guts, almost from the second she lays eyes on him, but I think you know where all this is going to lead, mais non?

Hmmmm, can love be round the corner? Well, not soon enough.

If My Old Lady simply settled into a drawing room romantic comedy with the trio verbally jousting until a few spanners in the works are overcome and everybody just damn well lived happily-ever-after, then we'd have been handed an innocuous well-played trifle. This would not have been the end of the world. Even I could have lived with that.

Unfortunately, a whole series of dark secrets begin to unfurl and plunges us into a half-baked melodrama we're supposed to swallow. Don't get me wrong, I love melodrama and I respect Horovitz for trying something akin to dramatic suicide, but the fact remains is that it simply doesn't work. The movie goes off the rails quite dreadfully and just keeps chugging its wheels until tedium and utter disbelief becomes the order of the day.

The movie does, thankfully, wrap itself into a nice bow with some funny bits just as we're about to throw in the towel, but it's too little too late. As a film director, though, Horovitz does manage to jockey things smoothly until his writing begins to tumble into a murky abyss. The verbiage, when it's funny, is pretty crisp and even the monologues (when they're not too deathly serious) don't feel stilted. Horovitz opens his play up - it is Paris, after all, so why not get a few good eyefuls of it, but occasionally he errs in opening up, seemingly for the sake of opening up. This is never something I'm happy to see when it feels forced and here it's too often shoved down our throats.

By the picture's end, we're left with a bit of a dog's breakfast, but when things click, they do so very nicely indeed. Finally, though, the glue that holds the entire thing together is the presence of Smith, Kline and Thomas who give it their all. It's not quite enough to save the picture, but I do suspect admirers of this trio will find some morsels of engagement in their very solid performances.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **½ Two-and-a-half Stars

My Old Lady is in a modest theatrical release throughout Canada via dFilms.

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THE DOUBLE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Ayoade's Darkly Funny Dostoyevsky Romp on dFilms BRD

A nebbish and a babe in Dostoyevskyville

The Double (2013)
Dir. Richard Ayoade
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, James Fox

Review By Greg Klymkiw

You're alone in a fetid, dark, dank subway car save for one lone faceless fellow buried in a newspaper. You spy a babe through the window on another car. Your reverie is shattered when the one other person rudely tells you that you're in his spot. You move. The train stops, but your new position keeps you from catching up to the babe AND your brief case with your whole life in it gets stuck in the train door.

This is not going to be a good day.

This is the story of Simon (Jesse Eisenberg), a nebbish in a living nightmare - one in which we ourselves might all feel we're in from time to time. Such is the superb writing of Avi Korine and director Richard Ayoade that Dostoyevsky's immortal novella not only springs to life, but does so in ways that enhance the universal qualities of the original source material.

The beats of this perverse tale never miss a step and our eyes are glued to the screen thanks to a winning combination of the droll writing and its director's mise-en-scene which hangs clouds of dreamlike putrescence before us that are thick enough to cut with a knife.

The elements of nastiness and savagery within the grotesque corporate bureaucracy we're thrust into also cut with a knife. Simon is just trying to get ahead in life which means getting a girl and moving up in the squalid company he works for. Alas, he's badgered every time he tries to get into the office building since he's lost his I.D. and is furthermore assailed by his snarky boss Mr. Papadopoulos (Wallace Shawn) who feels Simon's just not pulling his weight.

Simon knows differently, though. He's been making great progress and he has some knock-em-dead ideas he wants to get to the CEO, the mysteriously monickered The Colonel (James Fox). He also has his eye on that babe Hannah (Mia Wasikowska) from the train. She works in the company's photocopy room and, as luck would have it, she lives in an apartment across the way from his. He can spy her (or rather, on her, through a telescope) every night.

The problem, it seems, is that nasty wretch he met on the train. That lout, James (Jesse Eisenberg - no, not a typo) is a new employee in his department at work and worse yet, he's a double for Simon. The difference, though, is that James is everything Simon isn't and the horror of this situation and the mounting layers of bureaucratic corporate chicanery all point to one thing - Simon is on his way out because James is rapidly taking over his life.

Adding insult to injury is one of my favourite elements of this twisted tome. Papadopoulos has a mega-babe teenage daughter Melanie secured in his office. He puts Simon in charge of mentoring her as she has no ambition. Perhaps Simon can score some points, but alas, it's only going to be his double James who scores. He scores BIGTIME and moves in on the hot, lithe, little lassie and fills some holes in her education. If Papadopoulos thinks Simon is drilling his pert daughter, it's going to be tits-up for our corporate dweeb.

The Double is almost always funny and Eisenberg clearly relishes the opportunity to play the two decidedly different sides of the coin. The movie has babes, of course, so this is definitely a good deal and Wallace Shawn is always a welcome presence in any movie.

Though the film does tend to get a tiny bit measured in its final third, resulting in a strangely predictable denouement (strange given the original tone of the picture), it's a movie that finally holds its own as a savage indictment of how humanity tends to get the life sucked out of it in a world where everyone is a worker bee, a mere cog in the machine.

It doesn't get scarier than that. Nor funnier.

And, uh, it has babes to boot.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three-and-a-half-stars

The Double is now available on a gorgeously transferred Blu-Ray with a variety of extra features from D Films.

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WORDS AND PICTURES - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Teacher Romance on Blu-Ray via dFilms

Words and Pictures (2014)
Dir. Fred Schepisi
Starring: Clive Owen, Juliette Binoche

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Movies about teachers run the gamut of emotions. They can be lushly sentimental (1939's exquisite Goodbye Mr. Chips), ludicrously but winningly sentimental (To Sir With Love), horrendously treacly (The Dead Poets Society), complex and almost unbearably devastating (1951's The Browning Version) and hot babe teachers in the inner city who get to their thug charges by forceful inspiration (Dangerous Minds). There's elements of all these items to varying degrees in Fred (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Roxanne) Schepisi's Words and Pictures, though it attempts adding few new elements to the mix.

At it's most basic level, though, the movie is a fairly standard romantic comedy with a pair of teachers in a private school. Clive Owen is the irrepressible alcoholic English teacher who is on the verge of losing his job, even though his students absolutely adore him. Juliette Binoche is the new Fine Arts teacher who quickly manages to ingratiate herself upon her students also. These two definitely deserve a shot at falling in love.

The usual antics conspire against them, but there's never any doubt that they're going to end up happily ever after. What becomes the central conflict is an ideological tussle twixt the English teacher and the Art teacher. What's more important? Words? Or Music? The teachers are pitted against each other in a school wide competition to make public presentations that get the students really using their noggins with respect to the powers inherent in both art and literature.

Any movie that places so much emphasis upon learning, language and artistic expression is already ahead of the pack. That the movie is also a romance involving a middle-aged couple (albeit impossibly attractive middle-agers) is also a welcome reprieve from the usual rom-com dross. Gerald Di Pego's screenplay is happily literate and Schepisi's direction always sprightly. At the end of the day, this is fairly old-fashioned and traditional, but as such, comes as a welcome relief.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

Words and Pictures is available on Blu-Ray via dFilms. It comes replete with a superb commentary track from the legendary Australian director.

THE GUEST - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF MIDNIGHT MADNESS - TIFF 2014

Good thrillers
ALWAYS have
BABES & HUNKS
(in addition to
being, uh, good)

The Guest (2014)
Dir. Adam Wingard
Starring: Dan Stevens, Maika Monroe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This creepy, edge-of-you-seat thriller is a cool contemporary take on Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. It ain't Hitchcock (what is?) and The Master would never let scribe Simon Barrett get away with the disappointing, too-predictable "shocker" reveal that slides its way into the proceedings, but director Wingard more-than-ably puts his terrific thespians through decent blood-soaked gymnastics.

David's (Dan Stevens) an army pal of Caleb, a young fella who died bravely in battle. Returning from his tour of duty in lovely Afghanistan, he pays a surprise visit to the lad's grieving family to relay the verbal messages croaked out in his friend's death rattles. The family is so charmed by the handsome, but kind of "off" David, that he's invited into their home to stay as a guest.

Caleb's little sister, the babe-o-licious Anna (Maika Monroe, also leading the casting charge in It Follows) is certainly enamoured with David's buff, hunky good looks, but as the film progresses, she's able to see there's something not all together right with The Guest. Danger looms, as does the bloodletting.

When it's revealed that David might not entirely be telling the truth, she keeps her eye on him and eventually realizes her family might be at risk of being iced. This is not only a good deal for thriller fans, but it's a nice contemporary spin on Hitch's classic by utilizing the whole backdrop of psychos-in-the-army, post-traumatic stress disorder and, of course, America's ridiculous waste of human life in their moronic "war on terror".

Wingard's direction here is more taut and assured than his previous outing You're Next and even when the plot veers into please-don't-go-there territory (a similar problem that afflicted the aforementioned 2011 thriller), it's still a sheer delight to see how well the filmmaker manages the carnage, action and suspense. No need to be a total grumpy-pants like I was about the predictable turns eventually taken by the plot. The Guest is ultimately a corker of a thriller that'll more than satisfy one's need to accidentally expunge waste matter in one's panties.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

The Guest is a Dfilms and Picturehouse release launching in TIFF's 2014 Midnight Madness series.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON BY USING THE LINKS BELOW. CLICKING ON THEM AND THEN CLICKING THROUGH TO ANYTHING WILL ALLOW YOU TO ORDER AND IN SO DOING, SUPPORT THE ONGING MAINTENANCE OF THE FILM CORNER.

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MY OLD LADY - TIFF 2014 (Special Presentation) - Review By Greg Klymkiw

Maggie Smith. Kevin Kline. Head of boar.
What could possibly go wrong?

My Old Lady (2014)
Dir. Israel Horovitz
Starring: Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott-Thomas

Review By Greg Klymkiw

That 75-year-old writer Israel Horovitz has remain tethered to the theatrical roots of adapting his play to the big screen is not the main problem plaguing his belated feature-length directorial debut. The source material and, by extension, his screenplay for My Old Lady, is afflicted with a kind of narrative schizophrenia.

It's not, however, without some merit.

When we first meet Mathias Gold (Kevin Kline), he's penniless. Happily, his rudderless life in New York is behind him as he's depleted what little dough he had to fly across the pond and secure the Parisian home willed to him by his estranged and recently deceased father. Real estate values in Gay-Paree being sky's the limit, especially the choice property he's come into, Mathias feels like he's finally hit the freedom-58 jackpot.

His series of failed marriages, unpublished novels and flopper-roo suicide attempt seem like so many dust bunnies sucked up into a vacuum cleaner. Before hitting the big 6-0, maybe, just maybe, he's going to do some real living.

This, however, proves easier said than done. He is, after all, in France. It seems dear, departed daddy purchased the property under the perverse real estate laws of le beau pays de la romance and he's stuck with the original owner, the 92-year-old Mathilde (Maggie Smith), until she dies. Now, at this ripe age, you'd think it wouldn't be a problem, but the terms of such a purchase, known as a viager, stipulates that the rightful property owner must pay the original owner a generous monthly stipend. If these payments ever go into default, the buyer loses the property to the original owner.

Mathias has no money. None. Zip. Nada. He also has no home. Until he can figure out how to make the monthly payments, he's also forced into renting a room from the old lady. They do snipe ever-so amusingly and eruditely at one another. Never fear, though, Horovitz doesn't take us into some kind of sickening Harold and Maude wannabe territory. Mathilde, you see, has an unmarried, middle-aged, but super-hot daughter Chloé (Kristin Scott Thomas). She hates Mathias's guts, almost from the second she lays eyes on him, but I think you know where all this is going to lead, mais non?

Hmmmm, can love be round the corner? Well, not soon enough.

If My Old Lady simply settled into a drawing room romantic comedy with the trio verbally jousting until a few spanners in the works are overcome and everybody just damn well lived happily-ever-after, then we'd have been handed an innocuous well-played trifle. This would not have been the end of the world. Even I could have lived with that.

Unfortunately, a whole series of dark secrets begin to unfurl and plunges us into a half-baked melodrama we're supposed to swallow. Don't get me wrong, I love melodrama and I respect Horovitz for trying something akin to dramatic suicide, but the fact remains is that it simply doesn't work. The movie goes off the rails quite dreadfully and just keeps chugging its wheels until tedium and utter disbelief becomes the order of the day.

The movie does, thankfully, wrap itself into a nice bow with some funny bits just as we're about to throw in the towel, but it's too little too late. As a film director, though, Horovitz does manage to jockey things smoothly until his writing begins to tumble into a murky abyss. The verbiage, when it's funny, is pretty crisp and even the monologues (when they're not too deathly serious) don't feel stilted. Horovitz opens his play up - it is Paris, after all, so why not get a few good eyefuls of it, but occasionally he errs in opening up, seemingly for the sake of opening up. This is never something I'm happy to see when it feels forced and here it's too often shoved down our throats.

By the picture's end, we're left with a bit of a dog's breakfast, but when things click, they do so very nicely indeed. Finally, though, the glue that holds the entire thing together is the presence of Smith, Kline and Thomas who give it their all. It's not quite enough to save the picture, but I do suspect admirers of this trio will find some morsels of engagement in their very solid performances.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **½ Two-and-a-half Stars

My Old Lady via dFilms is a Special Presentation at TIFF 2014. Visit the festival website HERE.

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