BEFORE: OK, so today I was supposed to submit myself for medical research, which was going to net me a little extra cash for the summer. I know that sounds weird, but really, it was just to test out a new anti-shingles vaccine. I mean, I figured I needed to get this vaccine anyway, because nobody wants to get shingles, right? My dad had it a month ago and my sister said they gave him the vaccine just a bit too late, I think he was supposed to get it BEFORE contracting the disease, which would have been preferable. So I figured I could either book an appointment and pay my doctor for the visit, but what if I could get PAID for participating in this study instead - sounds like a win-win, right? Well I was all set to start raking in the bucks, but last night I figured I should go to my doctor's web-site and print out my medical records, that would save some time when I (probably) had to fill out a survey with all kinds of questions about my health, that's what I did when we got the COVID vaccines, we got them early for our age group and had to bring proof of underlying conditions to qualify.
So there on the computer screen, as part of my medical records, was a list of immunizations, and it turns out I got two doses of the shingles vaccine in 2019. I don't even remember getting that, maybe my doctor just gave it to me when I was there for my annual physical or something. Anyway, I had told the people running this clinical trial that I hadn't been vaccinated for this, when it turns out that I HAD. I guess the dangers of the pandemic just wiped the memory of getting the shingles vaxx right out of my mind - or perhaps after I got the shingles vaccine, I thought, "Well, now I never have to worry about this again..." and promptly forgot about it right then and there. Either way, I had to e-mail and withdraw myself from the clinical trial - better to find out now than to make a trip all the way to upper Manhattan and find out after they drew blood that I wasn't eligible. Now I've got to resume the summer job hunt, I guess because there will be no money coming from Big Pharma for my service.
Garret Dillahunt carries over from "Where the Crawdads Sing".
THE PLOT: When his girlfriend goes missing, David must track down her whereabouts after he realizes she's not who she was pretending to be.
AFTER: It's a weird thing to bring up in a movie, perhaps, but every year a certain number of people just - disappear. And not everyone gets found. They just found the body of an actor, Julian Sands, I guess he disappeared during a hike and died in the woods. Other people are never found, or their friends and family never learn what happened to them. (Do they still put the pictures of missing kids on milk cartons?). In the best case scenario, they left their lives voluntarily, things became too much for them to handle, and they just started over somewhere else, maybe under a new name. The other scenarios are worse, like they fell into a well or they got taken and held captive somewhere, for no purpose that can be good.
It's clear that something has happened to David's girlfriend, because she stops answering her phone and texts and none of her friends claim to have seen her lately. And she had such a great future working at the dry cleaners, too... Naturally David is heartbroken as time passes and he tries to put the pieces of his life back together again, but the film skips a lot of the crying and moping and second-guessing and we catch up with him about a year after Claire vanished. Actually, there's a lot of time-jumping in this film, it's riddled with flashbacks but they're not always identified as such - unfortunately this tends to get very confusing, like Claire shows up at David's door after her disappearance, but nope, she's not back, it's just a flashback to when they lived in neighboring apartments, before they got together.
If something is just TOO flashback-y, it can be a problem. I'm thinking of "Sweet Girl" and a few other notable films that are decidedly non-linear, yet adamantly refuse to put up those little helpful titles like "two months ago" or "one year later", creating a jigsaw puzzle effect out of the movie's events. Well, sure, I get that footage of David and Claire meeting each other would obviously take place BEFORE they moved in together and BEFORE she disappeared, but then why can't we see those events in the proper order? At other times the movie is clearly messing with us, like starting off with a sequence with both of them on the bus, and they just act like random strangers to each other, they accuse each other of following them, and then pretend to act confused when they both have keys to the same house. It's a role-playing thing, but it's structured this way for only one reason - to fool the audience. And once a director sets out to fool the audience, that rankles me a bit, and I wonder if the later flashbacks are there for the same reason, just to fool us.
The local (Los Angeles? Seattle?) police aren't much help, they just recommend that David put up flyers around town - but if Claire left of her own accord, or got taken by someone, flyers wouldn't be of much use in either situation. It's only when Claire's friend from college, Buck, comes to visit, that David starts to think that there's a third possibility. He comes home early one day and finds Buck tearing apart the furniture and busting holes in the wall, looking for something. What could it be, and what could that possibly have to do with Claire's disappearance? Ah, that would be telling, and I'll try to avoid spoilers on this one, because I've been remiss about that lately. But come on, the title of the film is a really big hint, isn't it?
All that the police can tell David is that she lied about her background - but that means maybe she wasn't truthful about other things, right? Somehow she wasn't who she was pretending to be? David finds clues that lead him to a shady auto shop, and then to Vancouver, and puts him in touch with people who claim to know who Claire really was - but are they telling him the truth? And is she dead or alive? David is in over his head, and of course makes some mistakes along the way - putting him in a room at one point with a man who I think came from Toronto. I'll admit I've never really seen a film on this topic before, not from this angle anyway, but I'm factoring in the non-linear structure and excessive flashback-ery when I'm ranking. There are also leaps in logic, I'm not always sure how David determined THIS from learning THAT.
Also starring Aaron Paul (last seen in "Fathers & Daughters"), Annabelle Wallis (last seen in "Boss Level"), Chris Chalk (last seen in "Being Flynn"), Zachary Knighton, Enver Gjokaj (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Michael Kopsa (last seen in "The Professor"), Jessica Heafey (ditto), Terry Chen (last seen in "The Cabin in the Woods"), Corey Schmitt, Colleen Winton (last seen in "Big Eyes"), Alan O'Silva (last seen in "The Zero Theorem"), Tim Perez (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Sal Sortino (last seen in "Watchmen"), Dean Redman (last seen in "The Layover"), Artine Tony Browne.
RATING: 5 out of 10 broken car windows
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