If you’re planning to build a suspense yarn around questionable moral choices, it’s not a bad idea if you actually provide some sense of who the people are
before they make those choices. In Kieran Darcy-Smith’s Australian drama, two couples from Sydney go on a holiday to Cambodia: married-with-kids Dave (Joel Edgerton) and Alice (Teresa Palmer), and Alice’s sister, Steph (co-screenwriter Felicity Price), and her new boyfriend, Jeremy (Antony Starr). But Jeremy disappears during one night of partying, leaving the other three to deal with the fallout of what happened. The “what happened” unfolds through a series of interspersed flashbacks, building anticipation for the fateful decisions that led to Jeremy’s disappearance. Chekhov, however, would not approve of the number of unfired over-the-fireplace-guns teased throughout the story, to say nothing of the guns that appear out of nowhere to shoot someone in the head. More troubling, Darcy-Smith and Price provide almost no context for whether Dave’s actions in particular are atypical, or part of grand cosmic comeuppance. Palmer does the strongest work as a wife trying to decide how much she can forgive, but the film around her fails to build the psychology the story demands. (Scott Renshaw)
