| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Contrived and one-sided, but well-acted (especially Evan Rachel WOOD’s performance) melodrama about friendship and the way in which memory works.
Informed by a rarely-practiced Christian sense of self-sacrifice, tainted here by the sacrifice being one coming from someone who has little to sacrifice. There is only a life thrown away that was going nowhere in the first place. Moreover, friendship here is defined as self-sacrifice when it is only through the self (that is paradoxically being sacrificed!) that one could ever experience such a thing as friendship.
Ultimately, the writer does not really know, as so many of us do not, how to define our friendships because they are never tested as they are here - nor would most of us have the courage to ascertain whether our friendships are nothing more than the fair-weather variety. Christianity is not the simple-minded solution to this problem, that is touted here, since friendship is ultimately based on knowledge of the other person, not faith in them.
The Sixth Sense-like twist ending is an unfortunate dramatic compromise which does not serve the drama well. It entices us in; while being a distraction from the major theme of human warmth and empathy. Yet, having said all that, this is an emotionally-involving drama that will either have you living in mortal dread of your friends or having in-depth discussions about it with them.
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