Out of Blue

For the most part, this has been a pretty decent trip through the various programs contained within the Festival. While TIFF is classed as a non-competitive film festival, one program (Platform) selects a small number of films for consideration by a jury. In previous TIFFs, the films have been challenging and thought-provoking.

I’ve seen three Platform films this year (with another three to come by the end of the weekend) and the results have been a little disappointing. The best of the first group was “Her Smell” with Elizabeth Moss, which I will write about shortly.

“Out of Blue” is a film by the English director Carol Morley and is her first film set in the US, specifically New Orleans. A female homicide detective (Patricia Clarkson) is called to investigate the death of an astrophysicist. In her investigation, relationships are stretched and family secrets unearthed. There are several references to astrophysics and concepts like the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment.

Given the calibre of the talent on screen (besides Clarkson, both Toby Jones and James Caan appear) and its inclusion in Platform, I was expecting a lot more. This was a film where an accumulation of problems made for a very frustrating experience. This ranged from the fundamental (neither the treatment of the physics or the police procedures was believable) to the use of the actors (why did a film set in New Orleans only include one actor with a slight Louisiana accent, especially when they established that the victim’s family were local) to the trivial (Clarkson’s character owns a cat. In one scene, the cat is sitting on her bed with her but you can see its eyes tracking on members of the crew).

After the film, I went back to the programmer’s notes to see if I’d missed anything but that wasn’t the case.  A waste of a lot of talent.