directed by:
Mark G Lakatos written by: Mark G Lakatos genre: Horror, Drama |
I'll be honest with ya and admit that I'm not entirely sure that I 'got' "Reunion" by the time it was finished - and that I did indeed give this twenty-minute film from Writer/Director Mark G. Lakatos a full rewind to see what it was I might have missed along the way that would have tied everything together. By the time I finished my first time through it, I was convinced there had to be some details that I somehow glossed over or a scene I didn't pay enough attention to. By the time I finished my second run-through, though, I don't know that all the blanks I was looking to fill really ever were.
At the beginning, we meet one of two brothers, Sean. The dude's a bit of a one-man anger festival, who is heading out to see his brother/father to make sure that he gets his cut of the family will. On a first watch, that makes enough sense as a plotline, even if it seems like it gets almost altogether abandoned on the surface as you go through this film - but on a second viewing, you'll likely feel like there are more sinister motivations for Sean allowing his brother Jacob to make the trip to see their father. Things get super confusing because Patrick Thomas Kovacs seems to play both Sean and Jacob, and the next time you see Kovacs onscreen, he's already switched roles…if I'm following this correctly? I put a question mark there because I'm honestly not sure that I did get this totally right - and I wonder about it because it feels like this story would have been so much clearer if those two roles had been divided up among two people instead of one. There has to be a purpose for this to be the case beyond them being merely twins. As it stands, we're kind of left to assume they're twins of some sort, even though you'll get from start to finish in "Reunion" without ever seeing both of them in the same room at one time, and in fact, the references to Sean almost disappear entirely once we're introduced to Jacob. As we meet Jacob's father, we can see the guy is in pretty damn bad shape. He's in a house all on his own, stuck in a bed with a blindfold on, and he seems like he's become a fairly belligerent dude. I mean, if his bland circumstances are all we have to go on, I'd assume I'd be a bit of an A-hole too. Jacob-Sean's dad is able to breathe to keep himself entertained, but aside from that…like…he can't even count the freakin' cracks in the ceiling to pass his time because of the blindfold he's got on. Of course, his arms move, so he could remove it if he wanted to, I guess, but I also assume that if there's nothing left for him to see, then what's the harm in keeping it on? What I will say, is that the blindfold itself looks like it came straight outta the late 1800s and could use a serious washing - but hey, maybe that's just the way I'm seeing it. Jacob's father goes on to recount the details of his time as a father when he was young, and his ensuing inadequacies as a man who spent too many of his years at the bottom of a bottle later on in life. One detail to note is that in their initial conversation, Jacob's father mentions being able to feel the cuts on Jacob's body when he was a young child, and as he scans the flesh on his arm to feel them again, it's clear that there are none there. Are we to assume that Jacob is actually Sean? That's a valid theory and one I've kicked around each time I watched "Reunion," – but if that is indeed the case, I don't think that it was ever made clear enough to the viewing audience to form a conclusive opinion. The few details we get about Sean after seeing him at the start of the film, do serve to separate him from Jacob and establish some differences between their personalities, but we don't get to spend quite enough time with either of 'em to really know one apart from the other. We spend most of the time with their father, played by Brett Bickley, which isn't all that bad – I felt like he made this film worth watching for the most part - when it came to the characters involved. He's a good actor, and he's got a lot of character in his expressions, even without being able to see his eyes staring back at us.
This IS a bizarre little oddity of a film. The twists are going to come fairly steadily from there on in, and with about seven minutes or so left in "Reunion," they're still doled out at a trickle's pace for the most part, but if anything, I felt like the direction of Lakatos really shined as the main star of the show here. I'm not gonna tell you that I don't think he's got some room in his writing to expand on his ideas and make them clearer, because I absolutely think that's the area where he's got the most opportunity to evolve in his craft, but as far as the camera work & direction are concerned, he's got the right instincts for the most part. Perhaps a few scenes here and there where he could have moved the lens a little more quickly in order to keep our imagination filling in the blanks. Eventually, we get to see a creature in this film as it plays on, and for example, the first time we lay eyes on it with it drooling and snarling away, it's super effective & pretty creepy. Seconds later, you'll get a much larger glimpse of it from a shot taken across the room, and it kinda looks like a glorified teddy bear that's taken steroids. That being said, for the vast majority of "Reunion," I felt like Lakatos did an exceptional job of making this film's mood and atmosphere eerily thick, and the film has a solid mix of tension all the way through. It had the right kind of desolate colours to support the thin framework of its desolate story, and in that respect, the attention to detail is there on a visual level, which is what kept me watching. As I pulled up to the finish line on the second time through "Reunion," I kind of had to marvel at the fact that its storyline still seemed to escape me. Like, I have a decent idea of what Lakatos was attempting to show us in "Reunion," but it really feels like there are key details being left out of the writing that would have anyone watching come to the conclusion he's probably hoping they will come to. Too much seems to be left to chance by the end of this film, and as a person that has watched four lifetime's worth of movies, I suppose I worry that if I can't be sure about what the story is here, there are definitely going to be others that struggle to figure this out as well. I'm not claiming to be the sharpest tool in the shed, but for a twenty-minute film that I've spent forty minutes watching - to feel like I'm still as far away from knowing what really happens in "Reunion" is kinda saying something, too. To sum things up here, "Reunion" is probably a lot more confusing than it's intended to be, or at least that's how it appears from the outside looking in. It's got a little bit of blood and gore, but it's a much more story-centric type of film, which is perhaps what made it feel more frustrating that Lakatos had clearly put so much effort into going that direction, yet we're still befuddled by the end of it. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it, though – heck, like I told ya, I was happy to watch this twice and see if I could somehow figure more of it out the second time than I did in the first spin through it, but I'm sad to report I failed in that regard, which might be on me. I gotta call things as I see 'em, though, so I'm gonna meet "Reunion" in the middle with two and a half stars out of five - because I really wanted to fully understand this film more than I did. Hopefully, you'll have more luck with that than I did. |
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