NZIFF 2020 – Sick, Sick, Sick REVIEW

NZIFF 2020 - Sick, Sick, Sick REVIEW

6/10

Summary

NZIFF 2020 – Sick, Sick, Sick REVIEW

Director – Alice Furtado

Starring – Luiza Kosovski, Juan Paiva, Digão Ribeiro, Silvia Buarque

Sick, Sick, Sick starts out well but loses its special aroma so quickly that it leaves a sour aftertaste in GARY STEEL’s mouth.

You know that thing where a movie starts out so well that you get a little frisson of excitement thinking about what might happen, but by the end it’s all gone horribly wrong?

Sick, Sick, Sick is a lot like that.

The film feels deliciously different as Silvia (Luiza Kosovski), a teenager still at high school, falls for new student and bad boy Artur (Juan Paiva). Anything but a typical nice-girl-meets-bad-boy romance, he’s clearly a caring chap under the façade and there’s something really cool about the way the two of them just hang out like teenagers in love for the first time might do.

Then, he dies. He’d told her that he’s a haemophiliac (what we used to call “a bleeder” back in the bad old days) and that his days were numbered, but she’s shocked at how quickly it all happens.

From that point, it all goes a bit weird. She can’t stop thinking about him and then she gets ill. But does she have a terminal disease or is it all in the mind? She takes time off school and the family go on holiday to a remote island where, to be honest, the film takes a turn for the boring.

After a while, it was hard to tell the difference between her fevered imagination and reality, and the thing that the movie slowly leads up to – her insane cultivating of an idea that through voodoo-type rites like the killing of chickens and going into a trance might raise her boyfriend from the dead – is just silly.

While the early part of Sick, Sick, Sick shows heaps of promise from the way the camera lingers on the actors’ faces to the unconventional editing to musical insertions that are tantalisingly brief, the last half is rather dull.

Brazilian director Alice Furtado will be worth watching out for. Next time, she might find a story with more going on than an initially arresting idea that ends up going nowhere.