What Comes Around, 2023.
Directed by Amy Redford.
Starring Summer Phoenix, Grace Van Dien, Jesse Garcia, Kyle Gallner, Indiana Affleck, Reina Hardesty, Sierra Rose, and Gabriel Monroe Eckert.
SYNOPSIS:
A young love affair becomes a menacing game of cat and mouse. Nothing and no one are as they seem…
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, What Comes Around wouldn’t exist.
For a film tackling thorny material such as inappropriate age gap relationships, calculated skirting around the age of consent, and the statute of limitations, director Amy Redford and playwright/screenwriter adapting Scott Organ’s (both of whom bear responsibility for this indefensible drivel) What Comes Around weaves these topics into its narrative with no thoughtfulness, trashy twists, and unbelievably stupid characters. There’s a part where the newly-turned 17-year-old girl Anna (Grace Van Dien) posits to her friend if she is an idiot that fell for a psychopath, a question that probably could be answered about 30 minutes prior, but also leaves no doubt in the mind that the answer is yes within the next scene.
Anna has fallen for a mid-twenties man named Eric (Kyle Gallner), who lives roughly 900 miles away and whom she got to know on a poetry forum. Now, Anna is the victim here, and this is clearly a case of grooming whether or not the man has noble intentions and has made a sincere connection with her. There’s no denying any of this. However, the point that it takes a horrendous, embarrassing screenplay writing these characters to reach a point where Anna’s actions no longer feel dismissible as naïve, but rather appallingly dumb, speaks to how misguided and awful this movie is.
The first sign of trouble (aside from him lying about being in college during their online video chat interactions) comes when Eric somehow locates where she lives and shows up at her home unannounced as a surprise for her 17th birthday. These early scenes deserve some slight credit, as they paint Eric as a charming enough person who could “nice guy” his way into tricking the book-smart Anna into dropping her guard. However, the more the direction slips into painting this as a harmless relationship, skepticism further emerges. It’s a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop, to figure out what these characters truly want from one another. Anna is so infatuated, she also can’t help herself from setting up a meeting between her mom (Summer Phoenix) and her new fiancé, high-ranking police official Tim (Jesse Garcia.)
Eric does not have good intentions. That part is not the least bit shocking. However, the secrets that come to the surface here are simultaneously wild, executed with no precision or sense of what it wants to say regarding the generic “hurt people hurt people message.” Perhaps this would be more forgivable if the film was trashy from the start, but it’s not. This means that with each subsequent reveal and twist, there is less to say and more to be angry about. During this freefall, the performances also transition into melodramatic nonsense.
There are ways What Comes Around could have potentially worked, considering the issue is not with the nature of the twist, but how it and these characters are presented. The story is never once believable when trying to bluff its revelations. Somehow, it reduces a victim to a laughably dumb character, while blowing itself up on every landmine it tries to navigate. Bad movies are a dime a dozen, but ones this ill-advised and shockingly inept don’t come around often. It’s worth watching to see what these filmmakers tried to pull off and how much they failed.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
