Wish You Were Here | Review

Do You Think You Can Tell?: Darcy-Smith’s Debut Promising, if Ultimately Contrived

Establishing an effective and potentially chilling set-up during its first few frames, Kieran Darcy-Smith’s Wish You Were Here evocatively recalls the Pink Floyd tune with which it shares a name for what promises to be a poetically charged mystery. Too bad that a stodgy and predictable finale will leave you cold, and potentially mars the film’s initial charms. Co-written with actress and star of the film, Felicity Price, Darcy-Smith builds an effective scenario to feverish foreboding, releasing its tension in a twinned lashing of shocking violence. But once the fury subsides and all has been revealed, it ends with the thud of a nicely packaged cliché.

Plopped into the midst of Dave (Joel Edgerton) and the very pregnant Alice’s (Felicity Price) strained domestic situation, we learn that they have recently returned from a vacation in Cambodia where they had been gallivanting with Alice’s younger sister, Steph (Teresa Palmer) and her suspiciously monied new boyfriend, Jeremy (Antony Starr). Unfortunately, Jeremy suddenly disappears without a trace one long, drug filled night with Dave and Steph. Unable to find him, Dave and Alice are forced to return home to care for their other two children. After staying as long as she can, the distraught Steph returns home as well, and with her return brings damaging truths about that night back to Alice and Dave to haunt them. Her presence causes a considerable rift in their marriage, forcing Alice and Dave’s emotions to spiral out of control. Bit by bit, we’re treated to flashbacks of that fateful night in Cambodia, where we learn that none of our characters are really the people they seem to be.

There is a whole slew of cinema with which Wish We Were Here could very well be in conversation with, perhaps most notably something along the lines of L’avventura, where an alarming disappearance of one character causes an uncomfortable relationship to develop between those left behind. But Darcy-Smith’s film hardly seems to be a damning portrait of callous and superficial human behavior that Antonioni examines. Instead, the lynchpin of the action seems to hinge on the increasingly uncomfortable marital strife of Dave and Anna, a couple unable to speak openly about subversive desires as they bring another child into the world without seeming quite prepared for it.

The performances of Edgerton and Price are compelling and wisely calibrated to carry the film through a potentially soggy narrative slump, likewise elevating the material beyond the trappings of a standard mystery thriller. Palmer gets considerably less screen time, and is reduced to playing a wanly written catalyst for dramatic conflict. Unfortunately, as more and more details are revealed, it quickly becomes evident just what was going on in Cambodia, and one can’t help but wish that Darcy-Smith and Price had ended the film sooner, perhaps avoiding altogether any type of concrete explanation.