by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $12.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Bailey Spalding, Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn, Tahlee Fereday, Alexandra Jensen, Ben O'Toole, Steve Le Marquand, Fletcher Humphrys
Intro:
… a great cast, good characters, slick direction and a terminal script.
It’s always nice when local genre movies embrace their innate Australianess. We’ve had quite a lot of it of late, with Sissy (2022), Talk to Me (2023) and this year’s Leviticus all proudly embracing our cultural peculiarities and unique identity. Penny Lane is Dead, from director Mia’kate Russell is another Aussie coded genre effort with a punk rock attitude, a stunning lead performance, but some major narrative and tonal issues that let it down. Still, it opens with The Angels playing their foot-stomping pub rock banger “Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again”, so it can’t be all bad.
Penny Lane is Dead is the story of three friends celebrating the end of high school and the beginnings of their new adult lives at a beach house in 1986. There’s Penny Lane (Bailey Spalding), the vivacious go-getter who has been accepted into a prestigious uni, Toni (Tahlee Fereday), her friend and fledgling romantic partner who got rejected from all the places she applied, and mousy, neurotic Amy (Alexandra Jensen) who is pleasant but chronically meek. The turd in the punchbowl arrives in the form of Penny’s hot (but crazy) goth cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn), who doses Penny with a drugged cupcake and then gets the hump when everyone objects. Things take a turn for the violent when Kat summons her dodgy speed-dealing boyfriend Angus (Ben O’Toole) and his equally shonky associates Merrick (Steve Le Marquand) and Rodowsky (Fletcher Humphrys) and turns the friendly party into a bloody, rapey massacre. But who will survive and will the rather grim title of the film prove to be true?
So, here’s the thing: Penny Lane has a flawless first act. It introduces our lead characters, gives us enough information to like and appreciate them all and then turns on a dime when we’re introduced to the true villain of the piece, Kat, played to capricious, malevolent perfection by Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn – daughter of Mendo himself! The era is perfectly captured, the strained relationship between Kat and her frenemies so well sketched and the sharp, blackly comedic tone deftly established. Then Kat’s mates arrive and the whole film takes a sharp turn into home invasionsville, with the psychological torture, rape and murder that so typifies that genre.
This abrupt shift into something far darker may take audiences by surprise, and the fate of one of the major characters is genuinely gruelling, even though it’s mostly offscreen. However, the film seems unaware of how dark its shenanigans actually are, and follows this brutal sequence with comedy-coded incompetent crims, and violence that is so ludicrously over-the-top and downright silly, it looks like it belongs in a Troma film! Penny Lane is Dead then goes on something of a rollercoaster ride, zipping into dark comedy and zany antics and then gruelling horror and torture again, with seemingly no rhyme or reason, culminating in an ending so ridiculous that your humble scribe was genuinely expecting it to be a Brazil-esque dream sequence fake out. Nup. They really chose to end the movie like… that.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with changing tones in a film, and the horror genre does this spectacularly well at times – look at From Dusk Till Dawn, Barbarian, The Cabin in the Woods, Sinners etc. – however, Penny Lane wants to have its tonal cake and eat it too. If your film goes from Muriel’s Wedding to The House of the Edge of the Park/Funny Games/Hounds of Love, you can’t go back again. Well, you can, but you won’t be taking your audience with you. There’s a reason why Cannibal Holocaust doesn’t end with a jaunty musical number.
It’s a pity too, because performances are uniformly great, with Bailey Spalding terrific as the almost otherworldly titular character, Steve Le Marquand is a great cranky, laconic foil for Ben O’Toole’s amphetamine addled ‘80s wanker and anchoring the whole caper is a genuinely superb turn from Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn, who just owns every single damn scene that she’s in. Mia’kate Russell is also, very clearly, a skilled director with a great mastery of suspense and comedy, it’s just that her script is so unwieldy and inconsistent that it can’t keep the train on the tracks. Please, Aussie genre directors, we beg you: hire script editors!
Ultimately, Penny Lane is Dead has a great cast, good characters, slick direction and a terminal script. The sheer chutzpah of many of the performances, particularly Mendelsohn’s, will probably keep boozy audiences engaged through most of the runtime, but everyone else will likely need to seek the services of a chiropractor to rid them of the effects of tonal whiplash.
