by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Cleo Meinck, Nathan Di Giovanni, Jonathan Maddocks
Intro:
… deeply heartfelt, if darkly nihilistic …
Sunny (Cleo Meinck). PJ (Nathan Di Giovanni). Floyd (Jonathan Maddocks).
Self-described as “three queers who fake their death and run away to ultimate freedom since kids are dying anyway”.
In their hometown of Jadebridge, there has been an epidemic of kids vanishing. Not that they’ve been taken away or even directly killed, but literally just vanishing. And so, Sunny, PJ and Floyd uproot and try their luck in Sydney while they still can.
Made on a microbudget in Western Australia, Taylor Broadley’s debut film is a bit shaky on the technical side of things. Its nostalgic 4:3 black-and-white visuals give the ethereal tones of the plot setup an almost-folkloric tone, as if this could be happening anywhere and anywhen.
Angus Strachan and James Gillespie’s cinematography paints a bleak picture of an environment that feels like it’s priming itself to erase people from existence, while the adults just carry on and seem heartbreakingly unaffected by it all. They even find clever uses of a wall projector to further the core ideas of escapism and fleeting social contact. But the sound mixing is incredibly inconsistent, often reducing the on-screen performers to barely-audible whispers, even when that softness doesn’t fit the tone of the scene. Due to the importance of the sound design for certain scenes (and the dialogue being a driving aspect of the film as a whole), it’s unfortunate that it is quite spotty.
Thankfully, it doesn’t detract entirely of the film’s positives, which begin with the central cast. According to Broadley himself, these three were brought into the production on short notice after the original choices weren’t able to make it to Perth in time for the shoot. The final three have a rapport that is so vibrant and joyous to witness that it’s hard to imagine this film involving anyone else. Broadley’s script provides them with a lot of healthy banter, which the performers excel at, and for a story that deals so intently in the connections (or lack thereof) between people, it was crucial that this aspect was nailed.
Even the most fun moments of the film – like an impromptu pirate shanty backed by a banjolin, or a pillow fort castle war, or an adorable mock-up of a Parisian first date – are undercut with an aching melancholy. Like fellow sci-fi-adjacent youth dramedy Spontaneous, there’s no direct reason given for the vanishings. Also, like Spontaneous, any potential explanation would only serve to muddy the pure dread created by the atmosphere that it leaves behind; a stark, fatalistic understanding of the world, and one’s place within it, from a teenager’s perspective. Where the young don’t matter, and leave nothing behind in their wake, while the world around them either burns, doesn’t care, or feels like a holding pen between those two awful options.
It’s small-town ennui that wouldn’t be out of place in Twin Peaks or a suburban flip on Picnic at Hanging Rock. Whatever glee can be mined out of these circumstances comes from imagining being anywhere else, of being anyone else, while that feeling serves as a constant reminder that it can all be snatched away in an instant. It’s a heady mixture of smile-worthy mateship and existential bleakness, the kind that sits in the gut after the credits roll.
Stubbornly Here is a flawed but impactful fable on what the eve of adulthood feels like. Meinck, Di Giovanni, and Maddocks are so enjoyable to watch bounce off each other that the whole film could just be them lounging in the sun on the hood of a car and it would still be worth checking out, which makes the tragic circumstances surrounding them make the impact so much deeper. There are aspects of the production that hold back the full efficacy of the film’s mood and thematic treasures, but for a debut, it shows a lot of promise and still makes for a deeply heartfelt, if darkly nihilistic, feature.
