‘Brightwood’ Review
Stars: Dana Berger, Max Woertendyke | Written and Directed by Dane Elcar
Let’s get this out of the way up front… I’ll be honest, in my opinion, Brightwood is one of the smartest well-executed high concept low low-budget projects I have seen in a good long while. I will be diving into the film a little bit but when you see something that is done this well, then, well it’s cards on the table time. Especially if for the first 10 minutes you are wondering if you will make the end credits.
I do believe that Brightwood started its life as a short movie from writer/director Dane Elcar and though I have not seen it, I am glad they blew this up into a full feature.
Jen and Dan are a married couple whose marriage is very much on the outs. The day we meet them Jen has decided to go for a run and Dan hoping to get in her good graces joins her. The couple come across a small lake and decide to do some laps of it while they air out some of their grievances (sort of). Not long into our little counselling jog, things begin to take a turn when our couple realise that while they are running in circles they end up at the start but there is no longer a trail out of there. Not long after this things get weirder as they come across others and it becomes a fight for survival as they look for answers to what is happening to them.
Given that they carry the whole movie, Max Woertendyke and Dana Berger as Dan and Jen are both excellent in my opinion. Their chemistry as a strained married couple is palpable as we first meet them and even as the situation escalates into near absurdity the leads manage to keep things just this side of bonkers. This movie could have easily slipped into a bit of a silly farce but with the steady hand of our director and these two leads, well we don’t have to worry.
One aspect of Brightwood I particularly loved was how we got fed the story in stages. How best to describe this? So we meet Jen and Dan at the start of the day and we spend a good chunk of the film with them, at some point we then start to follow Jen and Dan a bit further in the process. I thought this tactic was bloody brilliant and really really well done. Props to everyone involved because this would normally be where the science falls off but the groundwork was laid in terms of seemingly small moments becoming important. Huge props to our writer/director for keeping all these plates spinning, I would even go so far as to say that your usual timeline loopholes or continuity errors don’t appear in Brightwood.
Honestly, I was hugely impressed by Brightwood and Dane Elcar is a director I will be keeping an eye out for because I have not seen this genre done this well since Primer. Proving once again you don’t always need the bells and whistles when you have a tight script, quality actors and a crew creative enough to accomplish the vision with precision.
