Homewrecker – ★★

A film with good intentions, Homewrecker just doesn’t click due to some amateur work behind the camera. A genuinely disappointing film despite the efforts of its two leads to make it something more.

When happy-go-lucky interior designer Michelle (Alex Essoe) has a chance encounter at a fitness class with the pushy and overly friendly Linda (Precious Chong), she soon discovers there’s more to her than meets the eye and training might be bad for her health.

When Homewrecker takes a very sharp and needlessly aggressive turn in the final act that you wonder if the film could have done without it to be something better. Of course, this isn’t the only issue throughout the film, the slightly odd direction and cinematography. This looks like a cheap film, which isn’t always a bad thing, yet with cinematography choices that become a tad baffling, you start to wonder if everyone behind the camera were students.

The absolute worst aspect of the film is the rough as they come editing. It is near unforgivable that this type of work was allowed through the gate and not redone. Also, the sense of time is thoroughly lost to Gayne. The opening fitness sequence feels like it was over a weekend, yet we believe that this was several weeks. The camera lingers too often with dead air. The simple mistakes that truly take you out of the film cause you to laugh at it and not with it.

There are so many issues here that it would be an exhaustive list. Worst of all, you can tell that this is an interesting (if slightly flawed) script, yet all of that has been wasted by what was filmed. This gets to the point that you wonder if this was a film in one of those 48-hour filmmaking competitions. It is so rough and untidy that you think perhaps Neil Breen shot it. When tension tries to seep into the film, it leaves us as quickly as that pink bath water flows down the drain. This, at best, is the guiltiest of pleasures for anyone who enjoys it.

The saving grace? The two performances from Essoe and Chong try their best to make something out of this. They play off each other well, and when they get moments to just act in front of each other, that is when the film works the best. Even the split-screen moments between doors work; you feel them here (yes, even the psychotic Linda). That said, we get far too much of said split-screen that you wonder why they just didn’t have Michelle tied up so they could be face to face. Yet as soon as we leave them and the direction does what it does, we lose our connection.

There are good moments within the script, but for Homewrecker to be as short and set over such a brief time, there are too many themes attempted to be lumped in here. We see topics such as loneliness, obsession, ageing and jealousy. If the film had focused on one or two of those, it would do so much better, as then at least there would be more of a focus. Sadly we are left with a film that doesn’t quite know what it wants to say and, by trying to say so much, ends up saying nothing at all.

In the end, Homewrecker has two great leads who are putting a lot of effort in to make this a salvageable piece but are let down by everyone on the other side of that camera. It is a damn shame.

Homewrecker is out now on VoD.

★★

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